End date: 24 November 2005
Funding programme: e-Learning Frameworks and Tools programme
Project website:
http://tweed.lib.ed.ac.uk/RLI/
JISC theme(s): e-Learning
Resource list is a generic collection of data such as bibliographic
citation information, website links, course reserves, reading materials. A
common characteristic of resource lists resultant from different scenarios
is their lack of reusability. They are often created and stored in
proprietary formats. It is also problematical to export lists that are
intrinsically stored in some system repositories. Hence, reusing resource
lists often requires mediation and laborious manual tasks such as
reproducing the same lists for other system use scenarios.
Aims and Objectives
The aim is to develop a software development toolkit (SDK) to mediate the
reuse of resource lists created and stored in distributed and heterogeneous
systems ranging from e-learning tools, VLEs, portals, dedicated resource
list systems and repositories. Our proposed SDK consists of two components:
a resource list services manager and a demonstrator application. The services manager is an application framework to facilitate
a range of web services for managing pre-existed resource lists among
heterogeneous systems. The web services are based on the established
Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) model and the IMS Resource List
Interoperability Specification. The demonstrator is a web-based
application that allows potential implementers of the SDK to easily create
sample resource lists from federated searching of distributed resources and
use them to test the services manager. The
demonstrator is also a services consumer prototype which sends out the CRUD
services requests to, and receives results from the services manager.
Project Methodology
A large number of interoperability scenarios are
feasible because of the heterogeneities inherent from system types (VLE vs.
e-learning tools vs. repositories etc.) and implementations (per type, e.g.
WebCT vs. Blackboard vs. SAKAI). Enabling interoperability for each of
these scenarios would require the development of specific system
interfaces, bridging the core web services framework of the services
manager with the functionalities of the systems. Due to the short time
scale, this project will focus only on the development the core web
services framework, i.e. providing a reference implementation of the IMS
RLI specification, while piloting a limited set of system interfaces
sufficient for basic demonstration and testing.
Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders
This project aims to uncover implementation issues with regards to the IMS
RLI specification including data and web services (WSDL) bindings
validation. We anticipate the outcomes of the project to contribute towards
the implementation recommendations section of the “Best Practice and
Implementation” document of the specification (IMS 2004a, Section 4). The
project will deliver an SDK comprising a services manager, a set of Java
classes providing a range of web services for managing pre-existing
resource lists, and a demonstrator application. We anticipate the SDK to be
further developed for additional scenarios, particularly the realisation of
all IMS RLI use cases within different institutional contexts. For example,
implementers can adapt the SDK to work with their dedicated resource list
products and VLEs, to facilitate learning objects interoperability in the
X4L (JISC initiative) context such as annotating resource lists in the
RELOAD editor and then sending the lists to the Jorum repository for
archiving. The SDK would therefore underpin future ELF demonstration
developments.
Final Report This
project completed in Oct 05 and the final report is available at
the bottom of this page.
Project Partners
University of Wales Swansea
WebCT Inc