Slashdot Mirror
Open Meta Tools Make It Big
Morgahastu writes "Byte.com has a great article about open meta tools and open software in general: "After more than 10 years of open-software development in the scientific community, open software now holds a preeminent place in the operation of the computing community. The three products I have written about simply scratch the surface of the powerful tools available. OpenLDAP and OAI both enable a wide variety of sharing and automated access.""
It would maybe not make sense directly. However, set an LDAP system as a front-end to the database, and you can access all the data you need in a standard way; connect several library databases into one homogenous virtual database and so on.
Maybe (and this is blue-sky territory) have a personal LDPA server that in turn accesses all the data you have access to - search for 'Turing', and you will get Google links, references to his papers (with abstracts, and maybe full-text), and information on what publications are available at your local library, through inter-library loans, and what they would cost you to buy at any of several online bookstores.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The OAI spec mandates that data providers support unqualified Dublin Core, but you can provide any other metadata format you want in addition to Dublin Core (as long as there's an XML schema defining the format available). So, both
PRISM and SCORM should work with OAI (although
you might have to whip up an XML schema for
PRISM -- I'm not sure there's an official one in the works). Various communities are looking at OAI for exchanging non-Dublin Core metadata; librarians are looking at it for exchanging MARC data and other forms of metadata (such as the MODS and METS formats). I'd be surprised if someone isn't already trying to do an OAI/SCORM project.
Jerome McDonough
NYU Digital Library Team
jerome.mcdonough@nyu.edu
The Lightweight part of LDAP means that it is optimised for reading, and does not expect to be written to very much. Databases, on the other hand, could be considered heavyweight because, with transactions, they can guarantee the accuracy of the data.
You cannot run an airline reservation system on LDAP. If I update LDAP information, the next few readers might get stale data.
LDAP is thus lighter on resources, and, IMHO, would be a better tool for a library index.
Andy Rabagliati
A joke I used to make long ago with another co-worker was how easily we could be distracted into sinking loads of time and energy into doing "Meta Work"
Instead of doing the job, we'd see where if we just put in a little bit more infrastructure, we'd be 10 times more productive doing the actual work.
The Meta Work paid off, when the time came to the real work, it had to be done at the last minute in a real hurry, since we'd been squandering all that time doing the MetaWork.
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