[OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content and management standard!

Moritz Lennert mlennert at club.worldonline.be
Mon Jan 21 04:10:26 EST 2008


Hello,

First of all thanks for all the work !

However, I have a fundamental question: why does OSGeo have to impose 
such a standard ? Almost all types of formats are searchable nowadays 
and we can create a metadata base which contains all the relevant 
information, but why does all content have to be in this format ?

I think we all have varying constraints due to local situations which 
means that we won't always be able to use docbook, but as long as the 
content is available in some source form, this allows people to reuse 
it. In my eyes OSGeo should concentrate on a good collection of 
meta-data on available contents.

The exact toolchain to use for collaborative works is probably best 
decided project by project.

On 18/01/08 18:43, cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu wrote:
> 1) Comments or a general vote of OK so that we can implement; and

Ok for docbook (or latex for that matter, no religion on that - in my
experience they are equivalent for most uses).

However, I don't like the idea of OSGeo actively promoting a toolchain
which contains non-free software, e.g. XMLMind - the fact that you
mention it several times suggests that you have not found a satisfying
free alternative. From their license text, it is not clear to me what 
would happen if one of us used the contents created with XMLMind for a 
commercial consultancy. So, I suggest that if we go down the route you 
suggest, we promote free software in all steps.

I don't have any experience with specific xml-editors (have always used
simple text editors), but some existing related free projects (besides
the obvious candidates emacs and vi or kate and gedit) are (in no
particular order):

http://www.conglomerate.org/
http://www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout/
http://www.freespiders.org/projects/gmlview/
http://kxmleditor.sourceforge.net/


> 2) A commitment from some who have edu material or are writing edu
material to
> follow this standard so we build a searchable database of
> standardized educational content over the next 6 months.

Again, I don't think that a searchable database really depends on the 
format of the material. As I wrote a while ago, for me the collaborative 
creation of content and the collection and indexation of material are 
two different issues and should be approached as such.

For my project (french-language e-learning platform for free gis 
software in the context of a 4-month training), I will use what is best 
for the project. If docbook is a reasonable choice amongst others for 
the material, I can commit to choosing it over the other alternatives, 
but if not, I won't.

Moritz


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