Technology
The SMETE Open Federation technology services allow participating SMETE collections and services to form a cohesive digital library community that embraces and represents the fundamental diversity of our members. The technical foundation of the SMETE Open Federation is a set of sophisticated protocols and specifications to permit any SMETE collection or service to leverage the combined collections of the our members. Our approach offers a range of options for collections to use for participating in the SMETE Open Federation. Collections and services will be able to negotiate their participation to meet their needs from a set of options bounded by the following two endpoints of a continuum.
Tools for Interoperability
Through collaboration with the SMETE Open Federation, member collections and services will have free access to shared technology. One of the principal pieces of technology is software tools for interoperability at three levels: content, e.g., shared metadata; protocol, e.g., federated search and metadata harvesting; and transaction, e.g., digital rights management.
Content Interoperability
Cataloging
One of the principal technical hurdles to overcome in digital library interoperability is a cooperative cataloging approach for resources within the digital library collections so that people and computers will be able to find relevant objects by searching, as opposed to browsing the entire digital library one collection or object at a time until they find the right one.
To support collections and authors in creating metadata for their digital learning resources, we have compiled a list of metadata authoring (cataloging) tools that permit the creation of metadata through various means appropriate to the type of learning resources available to the author. The end-objective is to create a comprehensive metadata creation and management service for SMETE collection developers and end-users.
- The NEEDS Cataloging Tool allows you to add materials to the National Engineering Educational Delivery System.
- The IMS metadata add-in by Microsoft allows you to create IMS-compliant meta-data tags for your learning materials produced with all applications in the Office 2000 Professional suite of products.
User Profiles
- The SMETE Open Federation has proposed a specification for the type of information to capture in user profiles to enable learning in a digital library environment.
Protocol Interoperability
Federated Search
To expand the network of resource collections, we provide a federated search application programming interface (API) to enable search over multiple, remotely hosted SMETE collections simultaneously. Our approach allows for search over all participating SMETE collections from the SMETE Open Federation premier gateway at www.smete.org, as well as enables search from any participating peer to any participating peer. Thus member collections benefit from having a value-added gateway from their local collections into the full range of participating SMETE collections.
- The SMETE Open Federation has implemented a generalized federated search mechanism for educational digital libraries. The technical details are described in the SMETE Search API. (This work is based upon original testing conducted between the SMETE.ORG Portal, ENC and the Utah State University Instructional Architect project, using the originally proposed specification. This prototype demonstrates the type of search fields the libraries should support and the format of the search results. The original specification is loosely based on the Simple Digital Library Interoperability Protocol (SDLIP-Core).)
Hosting Services
The SMETE Open Federation will also catalog metadata and host collections as needed. This service is necessary in order to help incipient collections that do not yet have the technical infrastructure to host their own collection initially, but would like to share their resources and make them available to the SMETE Open Federation. Furthermore, some collections that meet the broad criteria for inclusion in the SMETE Digital Library, may wish to have their metadata replicated so that new, value-added services may be built around them.
Transactional Interoperability
Transactional interoperability permits member collections and services to integrate their back-end systems such as digital rights management systems, with other members' systems. This is one area of new development for the SMETE Open Federation.
Please contact the SMETE Open Federation contact for the Technology program area, Dr. Andy Dong (adong@smete.org), for information regarding the technology tools under development and distribution.
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