System Overview

This page highlights most of the pieces that I'm trying to put together to build what ever kinds of services that we need or want. It's not written in stone but I think it makes a lot of sense.

Siloed Applicatons

This is what we're trying to avoid. As you can see in the above graphic each application is self contained and doesn't share any parts with the other applications. This is bad because each application duplicates large portions of code and logic. It's like building a new house in order to change the channel on the TV or having a car that can only be used to go the grocery store and needing a second car that only knows how to go to work and back

Where We Want to Be

This shows how all the common parts are reused for all applications. This illustration also show how the storeage system provides preservation for all digital objects.

What are we doing at Western

Public Access

These are the basics things that we're going to make public.

Private

This is a digital achive that maintains and preserves all assets.

Web Services

While they may be many more this is a good begining

Object/Metadata Creation

Again while there may be many more content types in the future this is a eazy list to get started with. Each one of thise content type needs a metadata schema developed.

Content Types

  • image
  • video
  • learning object
  • research paper
  • capstone project
  • thesis
  • data sets
  • webpage

Ontologies

We need to get on top of this! Here is a list of common ontologies.

  • FOAF Friend of a Friend provides terms for describing people and their social network.

  • SIOC Semanticly Interlinked Online Commnunites

  • DOAP Description of a Project

  • DC Dublin Core

  • SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System

  • REV Review Vocabulary provides terms representing reviews

  • GoodRelations Provides terms for describing products and business entities

  • MusicOntology Music Ontology provides terms for describing artists, albums, tracks, but also performances, arrangements, etc.

  • ORG Organization Ontolgy describes the structure of organizations

  • LODE Open Description of Events (LODE) provides terms for

    describing the basic properties of an event and contains a list of axioms expressing mapping relationships with other ontologies such as DOLCE, CYC, CIDOC-CRM, Event Ontology, F, and SEM.

  • SchemaOrg Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo schema to enhance semantic search

  • British Library Data Model

Web Stack

The web is not monolithic but composed of many parts.

Applications are built up using the following standards and protocols.

The above is the stack that a web browser supports.

What's Our Stack

On the Client

  • HTML5
  • CSS 3
  • Javascript
  • XSLT
  • XForms

Middleware

  • WSGI (python web server abstraction)

Server

  • Apache
  • Webdav
  • Basex (XML database and search)
  • Sqlite
  • Postgress
  • Saxon (XSLT/XQuery Processor)
  • Maki (lightweight Python/XSLT web framework)
  • Python