Departmental thesis management system development using the integrated content environment
This project is an annexe to the funded project TheOREM to develop the 'Departmental Thesis Management System', using the Integrated Content Environment (ICE) developed at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. USQ will supply development and hosting services so that TheOREM can be demonstrate in an end-to-end context showing the production of a thesis from start to finish. ICE has been designed to deal with theses.
Project description and aims
The overall aim of this project is to demonstrate improved tool support for chemistry theses authoring and publication using a range of available technologies (including ORE). In more detail:
- The project takes TheOREM's validation of the ORE technology in the context of chemistry theses by implementing ORE in a production-standard software (ICE is in live use by faculty at USQ)
- Producing semantically rich HTML renditions of a thesis in addition to the formats mentioned in TheOREM by using ICE. This is key to allowing Web 2.0 style interaction with research outputs and is an essential step in treating a thesis as a datument (Murray-Rust & Rzepa 2004)
- Deploying a proof-of-concept Thesis Management System (ICETMS) which can be used by candidates, supervisors and potentially examiners to manage the creation of a thesis up to the point at which the degree is awarded
- Demonstrate repository integration between the ICETMS and three repositories, using ORE resource maps to describe the thesis, all its renditions (word processing files in OOXML and/or ODF, HTML and PDF as well as chemical data, tabular data, and RDF). USQ will develop solutions for ePrints and Fedora, Universoty of Cambridge will develop an equivalent solution for DSpace
- Demonstrate ORE-over-SWORD for Fedora only
- Provide a demonstration platform for the use of chemical tools such as OSCAR in as part of a thesis production process so that chemical terms can be marked up inline, allowing the thesis to be integrated (mashed-up) with other services and the semantic web
The focus of this project will be largely technical, developing tools rather than piloting their use over the long term.