Process Modeler for Microsoft Visio™ provides more than just a bunch of shapes and objects. It supports the full BPMN standard, which process definitions can be validated against the BPMN standard as well as several export formats to bridge the "Business - IT divide".

Before the advent of business process management systems (BPMS), there was a clear distinction between business process modeling and BPM application design. “Modeling” involved a set of tools for business analysts used to discover, diagram, analyze, and optimize business processes, often in concert with some formal methodology. The ultimate output of this effort, if used to create an automated BPM solution at all, served mainly as a “requirements document” that would (hopefully) be referenced by IT in the solution specification and design.

OR09 will be in Atlanta, Georgia!

 

Mark your calendars Open Repositories 2009 will be in Atlanta, Georgia on May 18b21. Check back soon for more details.

WS-* specs

There are a variety of specifications associated with web services. These specifications are in varying degrees of maturity and are maintained or supported by various standards bodies and entities. Specifications may complement, overlap, and compete with each other. Web service specifications are occasionally referred to collectively as "WS-*", though there is not a single managed set of specifications that this consistently refers to, nor a recognized owning body across them all. The reference term "WS-*" is more of a general nod to the fact that many specifications are named with "WS-" as their prefix. This page includes many of the specifications that might be considered a part of "WS-*".

Source of information on SOA.

This extension gives you a stylized error page with three buttons: Back, Reload, and Search. When in offline mode, the error page will display a Go Online button as well for quick connection access. The background image of the error page is a high quality 550x550 Firefox logo.

Custom Buttons² Firefox extension buttons can be written to do various tasks that the user may require. The buttons are coded in JavaScript. Many bookmarklets can easily be converted to buttons.

Extension developers will find this extension quite useful in the development cycle. JavaScript code can be prototyped in a custombutton, avoiding the reload chrome step till the code is proven. Then the code can be moved to the extension

iText is a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly.

iText is an ideal library for developers looking to enhance web- and other applications with dynamic PDF document generation and/or manipulation. iText is not an end-user tool. Typically you won't use it on your Desktop as you would use Acrobat or any other PDF application. Rather, you'll build iText into your own applications so that you can automate the PDF creation and manipulation process. For instance in one or more of the following situations:

• Due to time or size, the PDF documents can't be produced manually.
• The content of the document must be calculated or based on user input.
• The content needs to be customized or personalized.
• The PDF content needs to be served in a web environment.
• Documents are to be created in "batch process" mode.

You can use iText to:

• Serve PDF to a browser
• Generate dynamic documents from XML files or databases
• Use PDF's many interactive features
• Add bookmarks, page numbers, watermarks, etc.
• Split, concatenate, and manipulate PDF pages
• Automate filling out of PDF forms
• Add digital signatures to a PDF file
• And much more...

The e-Framework for Education and Research is an international initiative that provides information to institutions on investing in and using information technology infrastructure. It advocates service-oriented approaches to facilitate technical interoperability of core infrastructure as well as effective use of available funding.

PennTags provides an HTML interface, an internal API interface, and an RSS feed interface that can be helpful in integrating content into other systmes.  The Penn Library has begun to use this capability as a sort of content management system that provides superior integration features.

The Committee is an independent body, chaired by Professor Sir David Melville CBE, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Kent, and backed by the leading bodies in UK higher and further education.

Learning space design and development is becoming a hot topic as our colleges and universities seek to provide 21st century learning facilities, and technology has a vital role to play in this. Significant amounts of funding are being invested both by the funding bodies and by institutions investing hard-earned surpluses in their estates.

A Different Way to Read Great Literature!

This site is an experiment in teaching great literature in a very different way. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place... and so much more!

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

Think tank for everyday democracy

This document specifies BagIt, a hierarchical file package format for the exchange of generalized digital content. A "bag" has just enough structure to safely enclose a brief "tag" and a payload but does not require any knowledge of the payload's internal semantics. This BagIt format should be suitable for disk-based or network-based file package transfer. One important use case is the possibility of eventual safe return of a received bag. Tag information consists of a small number of top-level reserved file names, checksums for transfer validation, and optional small metadata blocks.

Also see GrabIt

An increasing number of institutions throughout the world face legal obligations or business needs to collect and preserve digital objects over several decades. A range of tools exists today to support the variety of preservation strategies such as migration or emulation. Yet, different preservation requirements across institutions and settings make the decision on which solution to implement very diffcult. The PLANETS Preservation Planning approach [JCDL2007] provides a solid way of making informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to optimally preserve digital objects for a given purpose. It is based on earlier work done in the DELOS Digital Preservation Cluster and builds on Utility Analysis to evaluate the performance of various solutions against well-defined requirements and goals. The methodology can be applied to any class of strategy, be it migration, emulation or different approaches, and has been validated in a series of case studies. Until now, preservation planning is largely a manual and tedious process where available solutions are evaluated against the specific requirements of a particular situation. Plato implements the well-documented and validated preservation planning methodology and integrates registries and services for preservation action and characterisation. It furthermore provides a sophisticated web-based interface for guiding the planner through the process.

The dynamic combination of QFS with HSMs such as Sun StorageTek SAM represents a powerful tool for developing archiving practices for specific industries or applications. When combined within a Sun integrated stack of software, hardware, and services, these file systems provide the foundation for Information Life Cycle Management with application integration. This combination allows data to be managed based on its value to the business.

Carl Grant

Tessella, the world leader in digital archiving
technology, has developed a ‘Safety Deposit Box’
to provide services to allow you to store and preserve
critical digital information in a highly reliable yet
accessible manner. Whether you are driven by
regulatory compliance, protection of digital property,
or effective knowledge management, you can rely on
Tessella SDB to maintain the information for as long
as you need it. Tessella SDB can be summed up in
three words:
Safety: The information that SDB manages can
always be found, whatever technology changes
occur in the future.
Deposit: SDB is a storage system where digital
knowledge is written, not manipulated. Accidental
deletion or changes are not possible.
Box: Tessella SDB is separate from your existing
operational systems. It is scalable from small
departmental servers to vast silos.
Service Architecture
SDB delivers a range of services to link with your
existing information management systems, including:
• Ingest automation
• Secure storage of digital objects
• Secure storage of metadata
• Resource discovery
• Digital preservation toolkit

DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) is a software tool developed by The National Archives to perform automated batch identification of file formats. Developed by its Digital Preservation Department as part of its broader digital preservation activities, DROID is designed to meet the fundamental requirement of any digital repository to be able to identify the precise format of all stored digital objects, and to link that identification to a central registry of technical information about that format and its dependencies.

This Report explores the roles, rights, responsibilities and relationships of institutions, data centres and other key stakeholders who work with data. It concentrates primarily on the UK scene with some reference to other relevant experience and opinion, and is framed as “a snapshot” of a relatively fast-moving field. It is strategically positioned to provide a bridge between the high-level RIN Framework of Principles and Guidelines for the stewardship of research data, and practitioner-focussed technical development work1. For ease of cross-reference, the number(s) of the relevant RIN Principle(s) are given against each of the recommendations1.

European study under DRIVER of standards important to this effort

The online registry of technical information. PRONOM is a resource for anyone requiring impartial and definitive information about the file formats, software products and other technical components required to support long-term access to electronic records and other digital objects of cultural, historical or business value.

EPrints is the most flexible platform for building high quality, high value repositories, recognised as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of research literature, scientific data, student theses, project reports, multimedia artefacts, teaching materials, scholarly collections, digitised records, exhibitions and performances.

SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) will take forward the Deposit protocol developed by a small working group as part of the JISC Digital Repositories Programme by implementing it as a lightweight web-service in four major repository software platforms: EPrints, DSpace, Fedora and IntraLibrary. The existing protocol documentation will be finalised by project partners and a prototype ‘smart deposit’ tool will be developed to facilitate easier and more effective population of repositories. The project intends to take an iterative approach to developing and revising the protocol, web-services and client implementation through evaluative testing and feedback mechanisms. Community acceptance and take-up will be sought through dissemination activities. The project is led by UKOLN, University of Bath, with partners at the Aberystwyth University, the University of Southampton and Intrallect Ltd. The project aims to improve the efficiency and quality of repository deposit and to diversity and expedite the options for timely population of repositories with content whilst promoting a common deposit interface and supporting the Information Environment principles of interoperability. For a handy introduction to SWORD, please see the following paper in Ariadne (as deposited in CADAIR).

Download PDF (326 KB) Fedora Commons is happy to post the draft of the first Fedora Commons Technology Roadmap. This is the beginning of a community process for governing technology development in Fedora Commons. The roadmap summarizes the strategic vision of Fedora Commons that guides development, documents the themes and priorities of our community summarizing the needs we will address, and provides a plan for the software releases we hope will enable those who adopt our technology.

Rapidly-expanding capacity requirements coupled with an industry shift to disk-based data storage make affordable, scalable, manageable and reliable storage hardware a “must-have” for institutions and enterprises of all sizes and ilks. Organizations around the globe, including major digital preservation sites, large outsourcers, co-locators, universities, libraries, scientific institutes, health care organizations, commercial film labs, and national archives have turned to Capricorn for their data storage solutions. For these customers, the PetaBox has redefined the economics of storage. With its unique storage architecture, Capricorn Technologies’ PetaBox delivers high density, highly reliable, highly scalable, and highly available data storage in a flexible environment with very low total cost of ownership. Whether you are looking to consolidate or migrate storage, streamline data archiving, expand overall capacity, or house fixed data content, the PetaBox offers an effective, affordable solution.

HTTrack is an easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide website from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting html, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

At Sun, our vision is to eliminate the "Digital Divide" that prevents people from getting an education because they don't have access to the right technology. Bridging this divide will accelerate everyone’s ability to join the Participation Age, enabling us to learn, share, interact, and solve problems together.

To fulfill that vision, Sun's mission is to help customers build the Digital Campus, a unified campus network in which individuals can interact and collaborate—no matter where they are—in a seamless, secure, personalized environment for learning and achievement.

Apache::Clean uses HTML::Clean to tidy up large, messy HTML, saving bandwidth. It is particularly useful with Apache::Compress for ultimate savings. Only documents with a content type of "text/html" are affected - all others are passed through unaltered.

Everything you wanted to know about web content compression

This module's handler emulates the CGI environment, allowing programmers to write scripts that run under CGI or mod_perl without change. Unlike Apache::Registry, the Apache::PerlRun handler does not cache the script inside of a subroutine. Scripts will be "compiled" every request. After the script has run, it's namespace is flushed of all variables and subroutines.

The Apache::Registry handler is much faster than Apache::PerlRun. However, Apache::PerlRun is much faster than CGI as the fork is still avoided and scripts can use modules which have been pre-loaded at server startup time. This module is meant for "Dirty" CGI Perl scripts which relied on the single request lifetime of CGI and cannot run under Apache::Registry without cleanup.

NAME

Apache::PerlRunFilter - run Perl scripts in an Apache::Filter chain

SYNOPSIS

#in httpd.conf
PerlModule Apache::PerlRunFilter
# Run the output of scripts through Apache::SSI
<Files ~ "\.pl$">
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Apache::PerlRunFilter Apache::SSI
PerlSetVar Filter on </Files>

# Generate some Perl code using templates, then execute it
<Files ~ "\.tpl$">
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler YourModule::GenCode Apache::PerlRunFilter
PerlSetVar Filter on </Files>

DESCRIPTION

This module is a subclass of Apache::PerlRun, and contains all of its functionality. The only difference between the two is that this module can be used in conjunction with the Apache::Filter module, whereas Apache::PerlRun cannot. It only takes a tiny little bit of code to make the filtering stuff work, so perhaps it would be more appropriate for the code to be integrated right into Apache::PerlRun. As it stands, I've had to duplicate a bunch of PerlRun's code here (in the handler routine), so bug fixes & feature changes must be made both places.

This module emulates the reporting functionalities of top(1), extended for mod_perl processes, mount(1), and df(1) utilities. It has a visual alerting capabilities and configurable automatic refresh mode. All the sections can be shown/hidden dynamically through the web interface.

Browse or search VIVO to discover who's working on a particular research topic; what they've taught or published recently; where facilities might be and what online tools are available to expedite research.

Sustainable and adaptable information technology tools that allow people to help themselves.

No subscription fees. No contracts. No consultants. No data entry.
No kidding.
No Data Entry
EpiSurveyor is a free, open source tool enabling anyone to very easily create a handheld data entry form, collect data on a mobile device, and then transfer the data back to a desktop or laptop for analysis -- without expensive consultants, software subscriptions, or long-term contracts.

Coming soon: EpiSurveyor running on Windows Mobile, Symbian phones (and other Java-enabled devices).

Learn more, or download the program or manual, using the menus at right.

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

WERA (WEb ARchive Access) is an archive viewer application that gives an Internet Archive Wayback Machine-like access to web archive collections as well as the possibility to do full text search and easy navigation between different versions of a web page.

Director, iTadd
University Libraries
University of Pennsylvania
215-898-2199
winkler4@upenn.edu

NISO links collected to form page navigation

The NISO Education Committee was first formed in early 2007 in response to a strategic restructuring. In order to respond to its broad constituency and their diverse needs, NISO needs to provide wide-ranging and robust education and training sessions. In addition to bringing in outside expertise and perspective, an education committee formed of individuals from diverse communities allows NISO to separate the content development—the main focus of this group—from the organizational and budgetary aspects of planning education programs and meetings.

The Education Committee will be responsible for determining the topical focus of educational programs, setting an agenda, and recruiting speakers. In addition, the Committee will identify other opportunities for NISO to educate and inform the information communities about its work.

If you are interested in participating in future events or have any suggestions or questions, please contact the committee chair or members, listed below.

    * Upcoming Events
    * Committee Roster

NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to manage information in our changing and ever-more digital environment. NISO standards apply both traditional and new technologies to the full range of information-related needs, including retrieval, re-purposing, storage, metadata, and preservation.

The Petabyte Storage Infrastructure Project will provide

1. low-cost, petabyte-scale, generic storage via the use of replicated commodity components, tape-less (i.e., disk-to-disk) backup, and a high level of administrative automation
2. a fast cache, to support large computations with intensive local storage
3. thousands of environmental sensors to support experimenting with collecting and storing large sensor-derived environmental data sets.

A Berkeley project.

Jean-Francois explains that CGI support is disabled by default in GlassFish but can be enabled and it seems quite easily. CGI support can be enabled either for specific web application or for all web applications running on GlassFish. See his blog for details on enabling support.

A Report on Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and Industry, UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2007

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive gathered a small group of people in San Francisco to discuss whether this was possible. Could we build something so grand? We concluded that we could. We located a copy of the Library of Congress card catalog, phoned publishers and asked them for their data, created a brand new database infrastructure for handling millions of dynamic records, wrote a new type of wiki that lets users enter structured data, set up a search engine to look through it all, and made the resulting site look good.

We hooked it up to the Internet Archive's book scanning project, so that you can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they've made available. And we hope to add a print-on-demand feature, so that you can get nice paper copies of these scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so you can fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book you've always loved.

But we can only do so much on our own. Hopefully we've done enough to make it clear that this project is for real—not simply another pie-in-the-sky idea—but we need your help to make it a reality. So we're opening up the demo we've built so far, opening up the source code, opening up the mailing lists, and hoping you'll join us in building Open Library. It sure is going to be a fun ride.

—Aaron Swartz and the Open Library team, 16 July 2007

This page gives an introduction to the Range objects. Using these, you can select any part of an HTML document and do something with this information. The most common Range is a user selection.

My demo page for my talk at laasist

Map of campus with notes on parking and such.  Check out the orange groves.

Conference announcement page

Home page of the LA Chapter of ASIST

Warhol rocks!

Enterprise-wide single sign on: Using JA-SIG's open source Central Authentication Service (CAS), the Acegi Security can participate in an enterprise-wide single sign on environment. You no longer need every web application to have its own authentication database. Nor are you restricted to single sign on across a single web container. Advanced single sign on features like proxy support and forced refresh of logins are supported by both CAS and Acegi Security.

Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.

Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits.

Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license. It may be used by anyone without charge. If you wish to incorporate Zebra into a commercial software distribution, please contact us about alternative licenses.

The Application Portfolio Management challenge

The typical IT organization expends as much as 80% of its human and capital resources maintaining an ever growing inventory of applications and supporting infrastructure. Born of autonomous business-unit-level decision making and mergers and acquisitions, many IT organizations manage multiple ERP applications, knowledge management systems, and BI and reporting tools. All are maintained and periodically upgraded, leading to costly duplication and unnecessary complexity in IT operations. Left unchecked, the demands on the IT organization to simply maintain its existing inventory of applications threatens to consume the capacity to deliver new projects.

Preconfiged setups for a wide variety of servers - i.e. a full tomcat environment

Social software like PennTags challenges the traditional model of open source software development. Such software relies on maximizing the community of users rather than the number of software installations and poses questions about the adoption of transportable metadata, privacy issues in sharing content across institutional boundaries, and open source hosted services.

nnovative Planning for the 21st-Century Academy: Creating Reality Through Technology, Collaboration, and Best Practices

Whether your focus is administrative services, information resources, teaching and learning, technology infrastructure, or management, you can benefit from attending the Seventh Annual EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference, January 15–17, 2008. Join us at the Baltimore Marriot Waterfront to:

• Hear from innovators and forward thinkers about current and emerging best practices in higher education information services
• Connect with others in positions similar to yours to exchange experiences and explore ways to tackle common challenges
• Learn about what’s going on in the profession and at the institutions in your area

This year's conference, "Innovative Planning for the 21st-Century Academy: Creating Reality Through Technology, Collaboration, and Best Practices," will explore innovative, collaborative, and practical responses to the complex challenges of shifting student demographics and expectations, expanding teaching and learning community support needs, increasing government compliancy issues, growing demand for assessment and accountability, constantly advancing technologies, continual interoperability issues, and decreasing resources.

Preconference seminars begin the morning of January 15, with the full conference program January 15–17, 2008. The program follows five key tracks:

• Enterprise Infrastructure and Technology for a New Age
• The Leadership Challenge in the 21st Century
• Leveraging 21st-Century Technology for User Services and Support
• Teaching and Learning in a Complex and Changing World
• Corporate and Campus Solutions

DUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

This post leads to the Veterinary Medicine Library homepage. This represents the collaboration of librarians, technologist, designers, faculty and students in generating a useful page of resources and services tailored to this community.

This post shows how use of systems like PennTags can enhance other's discovery efforts. This student has posted a book from the Library catalog that has general metadata attached. The student has provided a more detailed and specific discussion the movie "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" as propaganda for FDR's New Deal. Further, but tracing the PennTag post from the catalog to the student's project, other users can find a nice bibliography of materials on the topic of film as propaganda during the 1930's.

Much as Educause organizers ask bloggers and others to use the tag 'EDUCAUSE_MARC08', this class agreed to use the tag 'copyright' to quickly collect a corpus of materials and references for an advanced class on copyright and the media at Penn.

These posts were created by a librarian during a chat-based reference session with a student. During the interview, the librarian posted resources relavent to the student's inquiry, created a PennTags project and then gave the student a single URL to consult.

PennTags used to support research. This user is among our favorites and has over 1500 posts and 24 different projects. This project is on classical music in Hollywood. It combines items in the Library catalog, videos, and other materials.

A student generated bibliography using PennTags on for a class assignment. This student's bibliography has been picked up by Google's indexing and he because a resource for studies on fan culture and machinima.