[OSGeo-Edu] Re-starting our discussions

[Mark Leslie]

I've been hanging back on this to avoid getting sucked into another 
development project :(  From my perspective I really just need some 
means of searching or summarizing what's available, what it pertains to, 
technical depth, format, blah, blah, blah.  Once I can easily sift 
through what's there, there is more work it selecting it out and getting 
it packaged up properly for installation.

The sorting by product and language was a minimal thing.  The age of the 
material is fairly important, as is the format, so having the entry form 
to ensure structured data and a search form is ideal.

Feedback on the form at https://www.osgeo.org/node/add/edu-content:

* There are multiple authors, but only one contact email.  Is it 
appropriate to have an email for each author, and is there a need to 
have a contact that is not the author.
* Target Audience as selection fields is very nice.
* Language could be a dropdown.  Alternately, we would need case 
insensitive search capability.
* There's potential redundancy, or maybe a need for redundancy, between 
keyword and software.  I would expect a keyword search for 'QGIS' to 
find QGIS related material, but I wouldn't expect to enter it in both 
software AND keyword.

I'm getting pedantic now, so I'm going to move on to the search:

As near as I can tell, the current search performs text searching on the 
Authors list.  I like the simplicity of the interface, but we need to 
sort out what to search, and I don't think it should be every field. 
Maybe the title, keywords, software and language by default, with an 
option to include the description.  This really depends on what the 
search is capable of doing, and what we want to spend time doing.


Mark Leslie
Geospatial Software Architect
LISAsoft

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cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu wrote:
> Thanks Landon. I'm caught up in end of semester stuff right now.
> 
> Quoting Sunburned Surveyor <sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com>:
> 
>> What is our goal here?
> 
> Three things have led me to think we need a new educational inventory delivery
> mechanism:
> 
> (1) We've maxed out the wikipage. A while back Maria B. tried to add a new entry
> and the wiki warned her that we've reached the length limit.
> 
> (2) In wanting to start organizing material we have for the DVD project, Mark
> Leslie mentioned that the current Educational_Content_Inventory [1] page
> "structure makes it hard to quickly scan through."
> 
> (3) I'd like to get more actual content uploaded on the Subversion system so we
> can make progress toward "new derivatives." For example, if we have the source
> content for a particular tutorial, we can start to ask OSGeo local groups to
> start translating.
> 
> So, I think the goal is to develop a SEARCHABLE DATABASE OF TUTORIAL METADATA
> WITH LINKS TO EITHER SUBVERSION SOURCE OR LINKS TO THE URLS OF EXTERNAL
> LOCATIONS.
> 
> So this would require two pages:
> 
> 1) a page for authors to enter (and edit) their metadata into the database; and
> 2) a page for people to search for content that we have inventoried.
> 
> Finally, since I imagine this is a deep web application that Google won't
> inventory, I wonder if we still want the wiki page so people can find our
> material via Google searches as well.
> 
> Does that help? Let me know if my vision seems flawed in some way.
> 
> Tyler will have to chime in on how this is stored. Tyler, can you and Landon
> work together to implement this? How much work will it take? Can we get a goal
> for when it might be completed? I'm happy to help on design stuff if needed.
> 
> Cheers
> Charlie
> 
> 
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