JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

Background / Context 

Many of the requirements for ResourceBrowser have arisen from the JISC funded East of England Resource Network trial (EERN). EERN practitioners found the concept of ‘sharing’ a challenging one. In general, there is a poor culture of sharing within HE and FE. ResourceBrowser will directly address this issue by allowing users to browse their online social networks for resources, which will promote the development of online communities to foster a more conducive culture of sharing. In this way, we hope to strengthen and build new virtual relationships between practitioners based on their work and interests, and also on the commonalities that arise from the mutual benefits arising from the sharing of resources and best practise. The project will also contribute to the e-Learning programme through the development of a demonstrator application that will re-use existing JISC web services to allow users to browse their online social networks of people and resources.  

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to foster a more conducive culture of sharing of resources amongst practitioners, by allowing users to browse their online social networks for resources, which will promote the development of online communities. By combining resource sharing with social networking tools, we hope to help establish much stronger links between practitioners, whilst continuing to emphasise the ownership and originating sources for these sharable resources.

The specific objectives are to:

• Develop a demonstrator that will integrate both the DELTA and eProfile toolkits into a single user-interface.
• Allow users to view and search their social-networks (based on the eProfile functionality), plus they will be able to search resources in Delta.
• Exploit the benefits of linking the two toolkits together. For example, if the user finds a person (in eProfile) who has Delta resources, they will also be able to explore these resources within the same interface.
• Enhance the Delta search interface by using a graphical user-interface (similar to the eProfile Touchgraph interface) to allow users to select different subject ontologies (from Delta) and browse these in a visual way.

Project Methodology

This project will build a web client demonstrator that will make use of the eProfile and Delta toolkits. A new user-interface will be built that integrates the above functionality in a seamless way. The ResourceBrowser demonstrator will make use of the existing eProfile toolkit (web service) and demonstrator application (TouchGraph), and will allow users to create their own personal profile, and search and browse the social networks of all users. There will also be a new resource ontology browser. This will be a new user-interface component that will allow users to choose a Delta ontology from the Delta web service (Delta currently holds around 10 different subject ontologies based on the Web Ontology Language OWL), and then be able to graphically browse each subject ontology and retrieve resources from Delta. For this component we intend to make use of an OWL visualisation tool such as OwlViz  or Touchgraph. Finally there will be a new user-interface component to list the available Delta resources that have been retrieved either by browsing a persons social network or from the resource ontology browser. In the main this component will make use of the existing Delta web service API. In addition it will provide a mechanism to allow users, once they have found a resource, to link back to the resource originator’s eProfile social network.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

• The main software deliverables will be the ResourceBrowser demonstrator and updated versions of DELTA and eProfile
• These will be made available under an appropriate open source licence through Sourceforge.
• We expect to continue our well-established relationship with the JISC e-Framework programme, making these updated tools available within this service-oriented architecture (alongside DELTA and eProfile).
• The findings from the project will also be disseminated more broadly to users at JISC events and external conferences
• The project will yield valuable insights into the use of new social software amongst e-learning practitioners
• This can help illuminate some of the issues surrounding the sharing of resources
• Ultimately, the project addresses the interests and needs of both institutions and individual practitioners