[OSGeo-Edu] Re-starting our discussions
Landon Blake
lblake at ksninc.com
Tue Dec 16 12:47:29 EST 2008
Thank you Mark, Maria, Charlie, and Tyler for the comments on the
educational metadata content repository.
I feel obligated to share some information about the limitations of my
own skill set. I want everyone to understand what I can realistically
tackle.
The first thing I will point out is that I'm definitely not a web
developer. I'm a desktop application developer.
Having said that, I do want to learn more about the development of web
applications and I have even bought a book or two on JavaScript and
Perl. I'm not familiar with Drupal, and I must honestly admit that I
don't have a lot of time to learn new programming languages or web
application frameworks.
I have worked with MySQL, and I do know the concepts of RDBS design very
well. I'm also pretty good at whipping up a simple websites with HTML
and CSS.
So, within those limits, I am willing to help however I can. I just want
everyone to realize I'm much handier with desktop applications than I
ever will be with web applications. :]
In this sense, I may be more handy working on a metadata file format or
other elements of the backend than I will be on a fancy web application
front end.
To summarize, my ability to help with a web application to search and
catlog education content will be limited. :]
Landon
Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
-----Original Message-----
From: edu_discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:edu_discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Tyler Mitchell
(OSGeo)
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 7:44 AM
To: Maria Brovelli
Cc: OSGeo-edu
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Edu] Re-starting our discussions
Thanks for the feedback Mark, Maria and Charlie. Landon, I'll be
starting to look at this over the upcoming few days and let you know
where you might help. I'm on the road now and only working half time
for the next couple weeks, but I'll make sure this is on the table.
Tyler
p.s. If you are not enjoying -20C weather, please accept my
condolences ;-)
On 16-Dec-08, at 1:12 AM, Maria Brovelli wrote:
> Dear Mark, dear all OSGeo Edu folks
> the interface is simply but looks nice. I agree with you about
> having multiple contact email and the other things you suggest.
> Redundancy with respect to software and keyword must be mantained
> (theoretically we canhave also contributions not using a specific
> piece of software - as an example: algorithms used in geographic
> information systems).
> Keyword must be splitted in more text inputs in such a way to be
> used for searching (for example max number of keywords: 5). It
> could be usefull/necessary to define a list of possible keywords?
> Maybe yes, in order to allow users to search contributions.
>
> That's all. Regards. Maria
>
>
> Mark Leslie ha scritto:
>> 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
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>> Ph: +61 2 8570 5000 Fax: +61 2 8570 5099 Mob: +61
>> Suite 112, Jones Bay Wharf 19-21 Pirrama Rd Pyrmont NSW 2009
>> -------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> LISAsoft is part of the A2end Group of Companies
>> http://www.ardec.com.au
>> http://www.lisasoft.com
>> http://www.terrapages.com
>>
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Edu_discuss mailing list
>>> Edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org
>>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss
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