ReEngineering a National Online Portal An Australian Perspective

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Re-Engineering a National Online Portal An
Australian Perspective
Garry Putland Director, Education and Training
Services
Outline History of EdNA Online Re-engineering
EdNA Online Technologies, Specification and
standards Functional Advantages of
MYEDNA Walkthrough
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History of EdNA Online

• Launched in 1997
• Facilitate collaboration across states and across
  sectors
• EdNA Online is a browsable and searchable
  directory of online resources.
• Database driven website.
• Metadata records built using combination of data
  entry and automated harvesting from trusted
  sources
• Online resources described using metadata
  metadata repository
• EdNA Metadata Standard V1.1
• based on Dublin Core. 15 elements
• Used retail delivery model
• Developed collaboratively with stakeholders
• Supports national collaboration
• Collaborative development of services
• Priorities for services determined by
  stakeholders
• Uses collaborative tools to encourage the
  development of communities.

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History of EdNA Online

• Target Audience
• Services supporting teaching and learning from
  Early Childhood to Adult and Community Education
• Primary audience teachers, lecturers, policy
  makers, librarians, IT Managers
• Secondary audience students, parents
• Services
• Access to curriculum resources, research,
  professional development, innovative use of ICTs,
  communities of practice, about Australian
  education
• Pool of over 350,000 items to search (more than
  17,500 quality evaluated, 330,000 linked items
  and over 50,000 items from external repositories)
• Over 500 mail lists supporting online
  communication
• Regular online newsletters (currently more than
  16,000 subscribers)
• Growth from 2 million to 4 million hits per
  month in last 15 months

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Re-Engineering EdNA Online

• Business Service Delivery Models
• from a retail website to an aggregator, broker
  and provider of web services
• Retail personalisation and portal services
• Broker harvesting and federated searching
• Wholesale web services
• Portal technologies enable new service delivery
  alternatives.
• Demand for more sophisticated resource discovery
  mechanisms.
• Technical Considerations
• Outsourcing arrangement unable to keep pace with
  rate of change
• Emerging technologies, specifications and open
  standards
• open source, latest technical standards, RSS,
  XML, SOAP

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Re-Engineering EdNA Online

• Web Services
• RSS feeds for news headlines, newsletters, recent
  items added to the database
• Model of syndicating making available all
  content via RSS for display and delivery to third
  parties
• XML APIs for Search and Browse
• XML API for noticeboards/calendars, New Resources
  Added
• SOAP for single sign on
• Publishing to handheld devices
• Entry level points to make services easily
  available
• HTML versions of most services available aim to
  make all services available via HTML/Javascript

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Re-Engineering EdNA Online
Email, RSS Delivery (Push Model)
End Users
Web Access (Pull Model)
Functional Architecture
EdNA Online Portal- User Interface
Stakeholder Portals and Services
EdNA Portal
Third Party Portals
EdNA Functionality
MetadataRepository(Oracle)
Gov Education Portal
Discovery Services- Search- Browse
EdNA Sibling Sites- ICT Research- Technical
Standards etc
EdNA Online Web Services Interface
Communication Services
Harvesting, Distributed Search, RSS Aggregation
LMS, Handhelds, E-mails
Collaboration Services
Third Party Resource Collections
Resource Aggregation Interface
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Re-Engineering EdNA Online -Technologies

• Open Source content management Jahia
• Collaborative Source Licence Model
• Contribute small applications and reduce licence
  costs
• Benefit from community contributions
• Open Source personalisation Jahia
• Functionality within portlets
• Choice to turn on/off functions
• Selection of content to display
• Selection of location for content display
• Single sign on for multiple applications (eg
  forums)

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Technologies, Specifications and Standards

• Functional Requirement Technologies,
  Specifications and Standards used
• For Resource Discovery Dublin Core DCMI metadata
  V1.1, DC Qualifiers, EdNA Metadata Standard
  V1.1, RDF
• For Vocabulary AGIFT, SCIS, ScOT, ATED, VOCED,
  OZJAC
• For Metadata Repository Interchange OAI, IMS DRI,
  RDF
• For Distributed Searching Z39.50, ZING
  (SRW/SRU), SOAP, XML Query
• For Metadata Definition of content W3C XML
  schema
• For Data transformation XSL (Extensible
  Stylesheet Language),
• For Data modeling and description UML (Unified
  Modelling Language RDF (Resource Discovery
  Framework)

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Technologies, Specifications and Standards

• Functional Requirement Technologies,
  Specifications and Standards used
• Content Syndication RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0
• Software Development Java
• Application Framework J2EE
• Java Portlets API JSR 168
• Web Presentation and Accessibility W3C
  Accessibility Priority 1 (minimum), HTML 4,
  CSS, GIF, XHTML, XML/XSLT
• For Web services description Web Services
  Description Language (WSDL)
• For Web Services Transport Simple Object Access
  Protocol (SOAP)
• For Web services directory Universal
  Description, Discover and Integration (UDDI)
  

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Technical Architecture
other
OzProjects
ICT Standards
Education Portal
MyEDNA
Virtual Portals (Sibling Sites) personalisation,
customisation
Search ManagerDistributed search- Thesauri-
Dynamic Categories
Communities and Collaboration - document
sharing, forums, mail groups, chat
Standard Portlet API
Jahia Portal Engine (Open Source)
XML/HTML Templating Engine(JSP)
Jahia (Open Source) Content Management System
Single Sign On
Tomcat Java J2EE Servlet Engine (Open Source)
LDAP (open source) Security Directory
Apache Web Server Engine (Open Source)
PostGres (open Source) Database Engine
Linux
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Functional Advantages of MYEdNA

• MYEdNA - Personalisation.
• Customisation Collaborative workspace
• Distributed search increases access to more
  than 50,000 items to date
• Others manage this data
• Content management by users, not developers.
• Easy to implement new functions.
• Single sign-on.
• Can rapidly deploy new content (aggregation and
  syndication).
• EdNA Online services and content based on widely
  accepted standards and specifications
  collaboration interoperability
• Supports new business delivery models (retail and
  wholesale).
• eg all EdNA services can be deployed into other
  websites / portals or at the point of use.

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Walkthrough www.edna.edu.au

• MYEdNA
• Portlets
• RSS services from database
• RSS services external
• xml noticeboards
• xml browse
• xml search
• xml forums
• Search Centre
• Community Spaces
• information feeds
• Tools
• LCC
• Third Party Portals eg training.com.au

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Questions??

• Email gputland_at_educationau.edu.au
• EdNA Online www.edna.edu.au