Edukalibre Collab Moodle is one of the possible
Web interfaces to the Edukalibre Repository
Manager, a system to create collaborative
educational material with additional functionality
such as automatic conversion of documents, history
of documents, etc. This new interface runs over
Moodle and as the normal Collab tool, allows users
to perform the most common tasks over the system
using a Web browser. Some examples are: upload or
update a document, review the history of a
document, view the converted formats, edition
online of a document, etc.
Homepage:
http://edukalibre.org
Demo site:
http://edukalibre.org/moodle/course/view.php?id=2
Tar/GZ:
http://edukalibre.org/software/collabmoodle-0.8.2.tgz
CVS tree (cvsweb):
http://edukalibre.org:8080/[..]in/viewcvs.cgi/src/collab/moodle_module/
Mailing list archive:
http://edukalibre.org/pipermail/edukalibre-dev/
Support: support@edukalibre.org
Wow! This looks powerful.
Are there any installation
instructions? Stupid question
maybe - but will collabmoodle-0.8.2.tgz
run on a Windows system or does it
have to be Linux?
Hi,
Edukalibre is being developed for Linux systems.
Anyway, we don't close any door.
more info about the project is available here:
http://edukalibre.org/edukadocs/view.php?id=edukalibre_system_no_tech
Edukalibre is being developed for Linux systems.
Anyway, we don't close any door.
more info about the project is available here:
http://edukalibre.org/edukadocs/view.php?id=edukalibre_system_no_tech
I am astonished /impressed.. How nice, again a new Moodle direction...
I like the bridge between WYSIWYG and handling of Structured Documents.
I'm not totally sure what I'm looking at here, but it looks impressive...
What is the backend technology? Is it PHP/MySQL? Can you define user based access? Role based access?
How have you integrated it with Moodle's file system?
(so many questions...)
mike
What is the backend technology? Is it PHP/MySQL? Can you define user based access? Role based access?
How have you integrated it with Moodle's file system?
(so many questions...)
mike
Q1 .What is the backend technology? Is it PHP/MySQL?
Yes.
Collab performs mainly two actions:
- reads from a remote file the information about a document (with its links)
- uploads the document changes through a svn client
Q2. How have you integrated it with Moodle's file system?
All the document changes are uploaded to the Edukalibre server through a Subversion Client and all the information about documents is stored in that server (named Repository Manager).
Q3. Can you define user based access? Role based access?
One of the Edukalibre aims is to give permissions for each document in the Repository Manager, but this part will be in next versions.
All Collab-Moodle stores is the Edukalibre password needed for accessing the repository manager.
Yes.
Collab performs mainly two actions:
- reads from a remote file the information about a document (with its links)
- uploads the document changes through a svn client
Q2. How have you integrated it with Moodle's file system?
All the document changes are uploaded to the Edukalibre server through a Subversion Client and all the information about documents is stored in that server (named Repository Manager).
Q3. Can you define user based access? Role based access?
One of the Edukalibre aims is to give permissions for each document in the Repository Manager, but this part will be in next versions.
All Collab-Moodle stores is the Edukalibre password needed for accessing the repository manager.
More questions:
Can metadata like Dublin Core or LOM be used to describe the content?
Can the system handle formats it does not deeply understand? For example, does it usefully store and display(/make available) a Microsoft Word .doc-file. (Handling versions would be nice, but not a must.)
Can metadata like Dublin Core or LOM be used to describe the content?
Can the system handle formats it does not deeply understand? For example, does it usefully store and display(/make available) a Microsoft Word .doc-file. (Handling versions would be nice, but not a must.)
Sorry for the late!!
I'm learning a bit about Dublin Core just now ;) . For the time being we are using normal xml files and so Dublin Core could be useful for us.
Our next design is taking care of these formats. The biggest change is to difference between editable formats (OO,docbook,latex) and non editable formats like pdf, ps etc ...
In version 0.8 a Subversion repository is dedicated to Edukalibre documents exclusively, but in next versions that's going to change.
Cheers and sorry again for the late
I'm learning a bit about Dublin Core just now ;) . For the time being we are using normal xml files and so Dublin Core could be useful for us.
Our next design is taking care of these formats. The biggest change is to difference between editable formats (OO,docbook,latex) and non editable formats like pdf, ps etc ...
In version 0.8 a Subversion repository is dedicated to Edukalibre documents exclusively, but in next versions that's going to change.
Cheers and sorry again for the late
Sorry for the late!!
If the reason is that you were busy doing development, be as late as you wish.
I must say I quite excited about your development effort. I tried to subscribe to your mailinglist, but got only to the "waiting for approval" stage. I'm not quite certain how open your development process is and should I expect to get approved.
Are you by any chance using XP/Agile Process development models?
If the reason is that you were busy doing development, be as late as you wish.
I must say I quite excited about your development effort. I tried to subscribe to your mailinglist, but got only to the "waiting for approval" stage. I'm not quite certain how open your development process is and should I expect to get approved.
Are you by any chance using XP/Agile Process development models?
I tried to subscribe to your mailinglist, but got only to the "waiting
for approval" stage. I'm not quite certain how open your development
process is and should I expect to get approved.
Really??
I don't see anything in the mailman. Did you tried with edukalibre-dev?
Are you by any chance using XP/Agile Process development models?
No, we aren't
Cheers!. I see you in the edukalibre-dev mailing list ;)
Really??
I don't see anything in the mailman. Did you tried with edukalibre-dev?
Are you by any chance using XP/Agile Process development models?
No, we aren't
Cheers!. I see you in the edukalibre-dev mailing list ;)
I don't see anything in the mailman. Did you tried with edukalibre-dev?
No, I tried the first list on you mailinglists page. Seems that wasn't a public list.
No, I tried the first list on you mailinglists page. Seems that wasn't a public list.
Hi again!,
the correct mailing list is edukalibre-dev at edukalibre dot org
One of us send you a message with an invitation ;)
Anyway, the subscription is available here http://edukalibre.org/mailman/listinfo/edukalibre-dev
Saludos. luis
the correct mailing list is edukalibre-dev at edukalibre dot org
One of us send you a message with an invitation ;)
Anyway, the subscription is available here http://edukalibre.org/mailman/listinfo/edukalibre-dev
Saludos. luis
I'm learning a bit about Dublin Core just now ;) .
I'm right there with you. There are bound to be people around here with much more understanding about metadata and how to implement it than me. I won't let that shut me up.
It seems to me that nowadays a information system must allow people to choose and use any metadata specification, especially the one they wrote by themselves. To do that system should provive a generic metadata facility and leave choice and implementation of a metadata specification to the people using it. (The people in this context are the people reponsible for the installation, not necessarily the actual end user.)
If we at TAMK had a institution-wise DMS implemented, an actual use case would be as follows. A teacher authors some learning material on a DMS. When ready/stable, a version of that material will be "deposited" into digital library of the institution, which uses DC as its metadata. As learning objects, parts of the material will also go a national learning object exchange/repository, which in turn uses LOM. What would be the optimal metadata strategy for an DMS in that case? (Sorry if I'm going off-topic.)
I'm right there with you.
It seems to me that nowadays a information system must allow people to choose and use any metadata specification, especially the one they wrote by themselves. To do that system should provive a generic metadata facility and leave choice and implementation of a metadata specification to the people using it. (The people in this context are the people reponsible for the installation, not necessarily the actual end user.)
If we at TAMK had a institution-wise DMS implemented, an actual use case would be as follows. A teacher authors some learning material on a DMS. When ready/stable, a version of that material will be "deposited" into digital library of the institution, which uses DC as its metadata. As learning objects, parts of the material will also go a national learning object exchange/repository, which in turn uses LOM. What would be the optimal metadata strategy for an DMS in that case? (Sorry if I'm going off-topic.)
In terms of Metadata, let me offer some perspective from the world of metadata standards. Its a world that comes from both the Library and eLearning perspectives.
The starting point is Dublin Core, dubliccore.org.
It's a minimalist set of metadata from a Librarian's perspective.
Title, Author, Description, ID, Date, that's spirit of it.
This is quite generic and applies to anything.
Came about at a meeting in Dublin, OH, home of OCLC.
OCLC is the biggest provider of MARC records, which drives
library catalog systems. DC is much, much simpler than MARC
(and I've had to deal with MARC in my career).
Next up the line is LOM or Learning Object Metatdata.
IEEE is behind this, and the original work came from IMS.
See http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/ and http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata.
LOM contains Dublic Core as a proper subset
and adds to it for eLearning specific purposes.
LOM is also a part of SCORM.
Going sideways, there is METS or Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard.
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/
This is from the U.S. Library of Congress.
METS does have some fair following in digital preservation in the US Higher Ed
Library world.
One more to note, that's MPEG-21. http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-21/mpeg-21.htm. This is metadata that's directly within an MPEG.
Not widely used, part of the next generation of MPEG specification.
As you might notice, there's some chaos in this realm. IEEE has launched
a working group that is trying to resolve LOM, METS and MPEG-21.
It's chaired by Kerry Blinco
Technical Standards Adviser
Department of Education Science and Technology (DEST). Australia.
And Kerry is as good as anyone to lead this herd of cats.
For Edukalibre, I think DC is a reasonable 1st step, with LOM as the next one.
There are XML schemas that can be used for the syntax. Exact meanings, well
that will depend on the communities of practice, otherwise known as "Profiling".
We are building authoring tools that could use LOM for it's metadata, and we'd be happy with just DC.
The starting point is Dublin Core, dubliccore.org.
It's a minimalist set of metadata from a Librarian's perspective.
Title, Author, Description, ID, Date, that's spirit of it.
This is quite generic and applies to anything.
Came about at a meeting in Dublin, OH, home of OCLC.
OCLC is the biggest provider of MARC records, which drives
library catalog systems. DC is much, much simpler than MARC
(and I've had to deal with MARC in my career).
Next up the line is LOM or Learning Object Metatdata.
IEEE is behind this, and the original work came from IMS.
See http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/ and http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata.
LOM contains Dublic Core as a proper subset
and adds to it for eLearning specific purposes.
LOM is also a part of SCORM.
Going sideways, there is METS or Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard.
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/
This is from the U.S. Library of Congress.
METS does have some fair following in digital preservation in the US Higher Ed
Library world.
One more to note, that's MPEG-21. http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-21/mpeg-21.htm. This is metadata that's directly within an MPEG.
Not widely used, part of the next generation of MPEG specification.
As you might notice, there's some chaos in this realm. IEEE has launched
a working group that is trying to resolve LOM, METS and MPEG-21.
It's chaired by Kerry Blinco
Technical Standards Adviser
Department of Education Science and Technology (DEST). Australia.
And Kerry is as good as anyone to lead this herd of cats.
For Edukalibre, I think DC is a reasonable 1st step, with LOM as the next one.
There are XML schemas that can be used for the syntax. Exact meanings, well
that will depend on the communities of practice, otherwise known as "Profiling".
We are building authoring tools that could use LOM for it's metadata, and we'd be happy with just DC.
For Edukalibre, I think DC is a reasonable 1st step, with LOM as the next one.
There are XML schemas that can be used for the syntax. Exact meanings, well
that will depend on the communities of practice, otherwise known as "Profiling".
Thank you very much for your advice. I'm making a note of it ;)
Cheers.
There are XML schemas that can be used for the syntax. Exact meanings, well
that will depend on the communities of practice, otherwise known as "Profiling".
Thank you very much for your advice. I'm making a note of it ;)
Cheers.
Here's another thought on using the XML metadata from IMS/SCORM
and a full text search engine to create a Google/Yahoo like web directory.
The IMS Content Package is a file directory tree + imsmanifest.xml.
For exchange between systems, this is zipped up.
Within a digital respository (edukalibre), just use in the unzipped form.
That would fit nicely with SVN (or CVS).
Within the imsmanifest.xml, there is a structure that maps to the
files as resources. One can also associate metadata here, within this
XML. This is the IMS Metadata, which is a superset of DC.
Next, run the Lucene full text indexer over the imsmanifest.xml.
You can get Lucene from Apache. This is a commercial grade full
text search engine, the originator took many of the ideas from Excite
(which for a time had an open source release).
You can run the Lucene indexer DIRECTLY on the imsmanifest.xml.
Now you've got a full text database of all the metadata. I've done this before
with many other full text indexers, like Verity and Infoseek/Ultraseek/Inktomi.
Or freeWAIS. While one typically thinks about doing this on HTML, it will
work just fine on any old XML.
From here, you'd have to do some work to figure out how to formulate queries
and creating browsable directory listings. This is somewhat like Excite, Yahoo,
or Google directories. The Lucene query engine has both full text and boolean search capabilities.
In a local project here at UW-Madison, we are about to use Lucene to full-text
index an image collection of Art History (doesn't everyone have such a collection :-0) http://www.wisc.edu/arth/insitu/index.html
The current search is plain old SQL.
Looking as some of the example Lucene sites, I see lots of very interesting examples. Done right, this would do everything that Harvest Hive is doing B->
and a full text search engine to create a Google/Yahoo like web directory.
The IMS Content Package is a file directory tree + imsmanifest.xml.
For exchange between systems, this is zipped up.
Within a digital respository (edukalibre), just use in the unzipped form.
That would fit nicely with SVN (or CVS).
Within the imsmanifest.xml, there is a structure that maps to the
files as resources. One can also associate metadata here, within this
XML. This is the IMS Metadata, which is a superset of DC.
Next, run the Lucene full text indexer over the imsmanifest.xml.
You can get Lucene from Apache. This is a commercial grade full
text search engine, the originator took many of the ideas from Excite
(which for a time had an open source release).
You can run the Lucene indexer DIRECTLY on the imsmanifest.xml.
Now you've got a full text database of all the metadata. I've done this before
with many other full text indexers, like Verity and Infoseek/Ultraseek/Inktomi.
Or freeWAIS. While one typically thinks about doing this on HTML, it will
work just fine on any old XML.
From here, you'd have to do some work to figure out how to formulate queries
and creating browsable directory listings. This is somewhat like Excite, Yahoo,
or Google directories. The Lucene query engine has both full text and boolean search capabilities.
In a local project here at UW-Madison, we are about to use Lucene to full-text
index an image collection of Art History (doesn't everyone have such a collection :-0) http://www.wisc.edu/arth/insitu/index.html
The current search is plain old SQL.
Looking as some of the example Lucene sites, I see lots of very interesting examples. Done right, this would do everything that Harvest Hive is doing B->
I said:
...For the time being we are using normal xml files and so Dublin Core could be useful for us....
I'm afraid I was sleepy ;). We use rdf feeds for this metadata
...For the time being we are using normal xml files and so Dublin Core could be useful for us....
I'm afraid I was sleepy ;). We use rdf feeds for this metadata
Very exciting - nice work! Thanks for letting us know about this - I had no idea!
This is your key diagram for me:
Using Subversion together with WebDAV is a very nice idea and it seems you have done it quite well. Plus the multiple formats and RSS feeds ... cool.
My concerns are about access and protection of documents.
Even if these aren't solved yet, you've made a great start, well done! I look forward to checking this out in more detail.
This might be a great DMS layer for larger Moodle installations who can afford to install the very many dependencies required (eg Subversion for Redhat)
This is your key diagram for me:
Using Subversion together with WebDAV is a very nice idea and it seems you have done it quite well. Plus the multiple formats and RSS feeds ... cool.
My concerns are about access and protection of documents.
- How is your Moodle module talking to Subversion?
- How are users authenticated to Subversion and how is this related to Moodle users?
- How is correct access to individual documents controlled?
- For example, can a group of users work on a document in private, and then release it to two courses?
Even if these aren't solved yet, you've made a great start, well done! I look forward to checking this out in more detail.
This might be a great DMS layer for larger Moodle installations who can afford to install the very many dependencies required (eg Subversion for Redhat)
Will it run under SUSE?
One of our parterns have just installed the whole Edukalibre system in a Red Hat, and another one is trying to do it in a Suse.
Collab tool only depends on PHP and Subversion. If you
want to install you own Collab Moodle but don't want to cope with the
Repository Manager, you can tell us and we would prepare a Repository
which you could use in your tests.
Regards
Collab tool only depends on PHP and Subversion. If you
want to install you own Collab Moodle but don't want to cope with the
Repository Manager, you can tell us and we would prepare a Repository
which you could use in your tests.
Regards
How is your Moodle module talking to Subversion?
We use a Pear - php library to allow us to commit changes through a Subversion working directory.
How are users authenticated to Subversion and how is this related to Moodle users?
The repository manager (based on a svn server) offers an account for Edukalibre users.
Once a user has been authenticated, the pass is stored in the moodle database.I'm sure this part has to be improved.
How is correct access to individual documents controlled?
For example, can a group of users work on a document in private, and then release it to two courses?
Until now an Edukalibre user has write/read permissions over all the documents of the Repository Manager, but we are working in the next version and thinking how to deal with these permissions.
I'm sure all your advices and questions are going to improve the next version of the Edukalibre Moodle module
Saludos!
We use a Pear - php library to allow us to commit changes through a Subversion working directory.
How are users authenticated to Subversion and how is this related to Moodle users?
The repository manager (based on a svn server) offers an account for Edukalibre users.
Once a user has been authenticated, the pass is stored in the moodle database.I'm sure this part has to be improved.
How is correct access to individual documents controlled?
For example, can a group of users work on a document in private, and then release it to two courses?
Until now an Edukalibre user has write/read permissions over all the documents of the Repository Manager, but we are working in the next version and thinking how to deal with these permissions.
I'm sure all your advices and questions are going to improve the next version of the Edukalibre Moodle module
Saludos!