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This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of free online college classes available to the general public. We’ll be updating this list frequently, so please bookmark it for future reference and let us know about any broke

This specification defines an API that allows Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel to their main page. This allows for thread-like operation with message-passing as the coordination mechanism.

This is a work in progress! This document is changing on a daily if not hourly basis in response to comments and as a general part of its development process. Comments are very welcome, please send them to whatwg@whatwg.org. Thank you.

The current focus is in developing a first draft proposal.

Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in implementing this specification before it eventually reaches the call for implementations should join the WHATWG mailing list and take part in the discussions.

This specification is also being produced by the W3C Web Apps WG. The two specifications are identical from the table of contents onwards.

Mneme is a comprehensive assessment engine for Sakai that consists of an authoring module for creating questions and managing pools; a module for publishing assignments, tasks, tests and surveys; a grading module for evaluating assessments, optionally integrated with the Gradebook; and a delivery module for administering assessments to students. Additionally, a test-drive component allows instructors to take assessments as students.

DigIn provides hands-on experience and focused instruction for people seeking new careers in or improving their skills and knowledge of digital archives, digital libraries, digital document repositories and other kinds of digital collections. The explosion of digital information and the growth of online digital resources has led to a shortage of individuals with an understanding of the disciplines of libraries, document management and archives who also have the technical knowledge and skills needed to create, manage and support digital information collections. The six-course 18-credit hour graduate program will provide both new students and working professionals with a balanced mix of content that includes practical applied technology skills along with a foundation in the theory and practice of building and maintaining today’s digital collections. Certificate holders will be well positioned for careers in libraries, archives, local, state and federal government and the private sector. All coursework is online and may be completed in 15-27 months. Studies begin each summer with the course Introduction to Applied Technology. Students may then take either one or two courses each fall and spring, with a capstone course concluding the program each summer. The certificate program has been developed in cooperation with The Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records. Major funding for program development comes from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which has also provided funding for a limited number of scholarships.

Kevin F. Brady, Partner, Connolly Bove Paul W. Grimm, U.S. Magistrate Judge, (Maryland) Kevin Brady and Judge Paul Grimm provide a flowchart of the admissibility of electronic evidence. They explain when evidence is relevant, authentic, hearsay, and the exceptions that apply, as well as practice tips. Download the full article below.

ccHost is an open source (GPL licensed) project that provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using the Creative Commons licenses and metadata. It is the codebase used by ccMixter and other sites.

Besides its focus on sharing content, ccHost differentiates itself from other multi-media hosting programs by emphasizing the reuse (a.k.a. remixing) of content between artists, not only between artists on any given installation of ccHost, but between all installations across the web and any web site that implements the Creative Commons Sample Pool API, including non-ccHost sites such as the freesound project.

The Sun PASIG was started in early 2007 with its co-sponsor, Stanford University. The Sun PASIG is open to institutions and commercial organizations interested in working with Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Stanford U. in sharing practical experiences in the following: * Comparison of high-level OAIS architectures, services-oriented architecture work, and use cases * Sharing of best practices and software code * Cooperation on standard, open, 'in-a-box' solutions around repository technologies * Review of storage architectures and trends and their relation to preservation and archiving architectures and eResearch data set management * Discussion of the uses of commercial third party and community-developed solutions The organization is focused on sharing open computing solutions and best practices. But while sharing information about the state-of-the-art developments in standards and open source is important, this is not a standards-setting organization. It is a place to share practical experiences, successes, pain points, and potential topics for more collaboration. Advisors come from leading academic and government agencies worldwide. Sun does reserve the right to exclude direct competitors from the conference proceedings.

What Jangle (Just another generic library environment) is an experiment with middleware for library applications. If you build, use, manage or just want simple access to a library system, Jangle could be for you. Why The aim of the Jangle project is to provide a free, easy to use framework for building web services for LMSs/ILSs by exposing resources through the Atom Publishing Protocol. The goal of Jangle is to develop conventions intercommunication between the backend library services, such as ILSes and other applications and the AtomPub server (known as the Jangle "core"). By leveraging AtomPub, it eliminates the need to develop an entirely new API and allows developers to use existing client library and knowledge to easily integrate library data into new places.

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

HUBzero allows you to create dynamic web sites that connect a community in scientific research and educational activities. HUBzero sites combine powerful Web 2.0 concepts with a middleware that provides instant access to interactive simulation tools. These tools are not just Java applets, but real research codes that can access TeraGrid, the Open Science Grid, and other national Grid computing resources for extra cycles. HUBzero was created by researchers at Purdue University in conjunction with the NSF-sponsored Network for Computational Nanotechnology. The technology was originally developed to support nanoHUB.org, a national resource for nanotechnology simulation. It has since been extended to create science gateways for other scientific domains.

The Rappture toolkit provides the basic infrastructure for a large class of scientific applications, letting scientists focus on their core algorithm when developing new simulators. Here's a demo of a Rappture interface for a Matlab script which simulates conduction through a molecule. This interface was generated automatically by Rappture, based on a description of the tool inputs and outputs. Rappture also makes it easy to put a friendly, interactive interface on existing legacy applications, without having to rewrite the code. For example, the SPICE circuit simulator has been around since 1972. You can now run SPICE on the nanoHUB via a simple Rappture interface. This shows the power of taking a powerful, batch-processing tool, and making it more interactive and accessible.

The objectives of the MEDICUS project are to promote transparent and non-proprietary solutions for medical image processing, and medical image and data sharing between heath care providers, physicians, and researchers in the life sciences. The Globus Toolkit provides the necessary architecture platform and standards to engage in this diverse and difficult field. As such it provides a vendor independent solution to efficiently communicate medical images and image outcome at various levels in the healthcare enterprise. This project will hopefully excel imaging research and health care by delivering a Globus Toolkit compliant extension to efficiently communicate medical image, diagnosis, and related data between health care providers in Grid environments.

Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations [PDF 3.3 MB]

Goals

* Conduct an analysis of previous and current models for sustainable digital preservation, and identify current best practices among existing collections, repositories and analogous enterprises.

* Develop a set of economically viable recommendations to catalyze the development of reliable strategies for the preservation of digital information.

* Provide a research agenda to organize and motivate future work in the specific area of economic sustainability of digital information.

The Data Audit Framework (DAF) provides organisations with the means to identify, locate, describe and assess how they are managing their research data assets. DAF combines a set of methods with an online tool to enable data auditors to gather this information. DAF will help ensure that research data produced in UK Higher Education Institutions is preserved and remains accessible in the long term.

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) are delighted to announce the release of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) toolkit. This toolkit is intended to facilitate internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths. Digital repositories are still in their infancy and this model is designed to be responsive to the rapidly developing landscape. The development of the toolkit follows a concentrated period of repository pilot audits undertaken by the DCC, conducted at a diverse range of organisations including national libraries, scientific data centres and cultural and heritage data archives.

SKOS is an area of work developing specifications and standards to support the use of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web. SKOS & RDF SKOS provides a standard way to represent knowledge organization systems using the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Encoding this information in RDF allows it to be passed between computer applications in an interoperable way. Using RDF also allows knowledge organization systems to be used in distributed, decentralised metadata applications. Decentralised metadata is becoming a typical scenario, where service providers want to add value to metadata harvested from multiple sources.

A clearinghouse for ideas, news, and resources in support of citizen science-- partnerships between volunteers and scientists that answer real-world questions. managed by cornell

Scientists in a variety of disciplines (e.g., biology, ecology, astronomy) need access to scientific data and flexible means for executing complex analyses on those data. Such analyses can be captured as 'scientific workflows' in which the flow of data from one analytical step to another is captured in a formal workflow language. The Kepler project's overall goal is to produce an open-source scientific workflow system that allows scientists to design scientific workflows and execute them efficiently using emerging Grid-based approaches to distributed computation. Kepler is based on the Ptolemy II system for heterogeneous, concurrent modeling and design. Ptolemy II was developed by the members of the Ptolemy project at UC Berkeley. Although not originally intended for scientific workflows, it provides a mature platform for building and executing workflows, and supports multiple models of computation.

Metacat is a flexible metadata database. It utilizes XML as a common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content standards that are relevant to ecology. Thus, Metacat is a generic XML database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema.

The Metacat database models XML documents as a DOM tree, basically decomposing the nodes of the XML document and storing the node data as a series of records in a relational database via a JDBC connection. At this point, only Oracle and PostgreSQL have been tested as a backend databases, but we have avoided RDBMS specific features in order to maintain portability to other relational databases.

Metacat is implemented as a Java Servlet, and so communicates using basic HTTP protocol semantics. The figure below shows the basic structure of the Metacat architecture. A well defined interface for inserting, updating, deleting, querying, and transforming (using XSL) XML documents is presented. We would like to add the DOM API as an alternative supported mechanism for interacting with Metacat, but have not yet implemented this functionality.

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.

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

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.

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

As integration and standardization of widgets occurs, PennTags content can be easily exported to other frameworks like:

With Lokahi, you can perform a number of management tasks on key application servers. The current release provides management functionality for Apache, Tomcat, and mod_jk, such as:

• Start/stop/graceful Apache
• Add/remove virtual host
• Change virtual host configurations
• Start/stop Tomcat JVM
• Add/remove context
• Change context configurations
• Reload context in memory
• Add/remove/modify JVM
• Manage management permissions by application

Lokahi can manage application servers across server pools and across instances, greatly simplifying the management of complex infrastructure. See About Lokahi for more benefits of Lokahi.

From the website:

About MetaArchive: Collaboratively preserving our digital heritage

The MetaArchive Cooperative provides low-cost, high-impact preservation services to help ensure the long-term accessibility of the digital assets of universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Why we need digital preservation. Today, more than 93% of the world’s information is produced as digital files, not print documents. How do we care for these new digital resources—from government websites to corporate emails and from scanned images to born-digital recordings? As evidenced by such catastrophic events as blackouts, fires, and hurricanes, as well as basic hardware and software failures, we need to act now to begin providing long-term digital preservation services for our digital history or we risk losing them altogether.

What we do. The MetaArchive Cooperative is building Trusted Digital Repositories to provide long-term care for digital materials. The Cooperative was formed in 2004 out of our increasing concern that the digital items that define our culture and history might be forever lost due to natural disaster, human error, or sheer neglect. The Cooperative functions as a community initiative. Its collaborative networks are comprised of libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions that seek to cooperatively preserve their digital materials, not by outsourcing to other organizations, but by actively participating in the preservation of their own content.

How we do it. To preserve digital assets, the MetaArchive Cooperative uses a systemic, forward-looking technological approach called distributed digital preservation. Our member institutions identify collections that they want to preserve. These collections are then ingested by our system and are copied, distributed and stored on secure file servers in multiple locations. These servers do not merely back up the materials, but rather provide a dynamic means of constantly checking each file and providing repairs whenever necessary. 

From the website:

Open Resource Manager addresses the needs of the modern data center by:

    * Improving reliability on the hardware and application level
    * Giving system administrators full control of the data-center
    * Provisioning servers within a few minutes
    * Consistently applying policies across servers
    * Adjusting resources based on business demands
    * Managing heterogeneous x86 hardware

From the Website:

Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

The future of content hosting in sakai.  Argues for more robust implementation to be the face of the DLA, DSpace, and the image store

From the website:

There is currently a beta quality JCR implementation of Content Hosting in trunk. This work was originaly done and documented in SAK-10366. This is some good historical information available too, but that is now deprecated. This page will deal specifically with JCR information related to the ContentHostingService and parts of the Resources tool. For general information about JSR-170 support in Sakai see here

The very first phase of JCR integration for Resources is an implementation of the existing ContentHostingService API using a JCR backend. With this initial support, the Resources Tool and Sakai DAV are meant to operate as they stand with no changes to their code.

 

From the website:

Developed at James Madison University, the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) software brings the digital image library into the teaching and learning process.

The purpose of this website is to make the MDID software available for download and to share information with the MDID user community. Since the first release in 2001 many institutions have implemented the MDID software with their own digital image collections. MDID2 users can share collections with each other, giving institutions instant access to previously unavailable image collections.

 Imports XML representations.

From the website:

ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

    * With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
    * With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
    * With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.

From the website:

UC Berkeley is developing a podcast capture, post-processing, and distribution system that will integrate current technological advancements such as Apple's Podcast Producer with existing academic community source frameworks such as Sakai to replace its antiquated system.

The initial release of the OpenCast system is projected for Fall 2008 and will satisfy our campus' local needs.  This system will not be a turn key solution since many institutions have different organizational, policy, and business requirements, and demand a certain level of cost for adoption. Nevertheless. UC Berkeley has taken steps to develop a flexible object model that will allow other schools to potentially participate in a broader community source initiative.   Because other institutions use CLE solutions outside of Sakai, the OpenCast system will run standalone as well as within the Sakai environment, and is designed to abstract Podcast Producer as a "Media Processing and Capture Engine" to allow for other alternatives.

From the website:

Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices. Derived from Squeak, it features a peer-based network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation between multiple users on multiple devices.

Every part of the system is designed around enabling real-time, identical interactions between groups of users. Croquet's architecture is designed to make it easy to develop deeply collaborative applications without having to spend a lot of effort and expertise in understanding how replicated applications work.

Using the Croquet Software Developer's Kit (SDK), developers can create and link powerful and highly collaborative cross-platform multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations - making possible the distributed deployment of very large scale, richly featured and interlinked virtual spaces.

From the website:

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

From the website:

Making Ajax and Related Technologies Accessible

Many Web applications developed with Ajax, DHTML, and other technologies pose accessibility challenges. For example, if the content of a Web page changes in response to user actions, that new content may not be available to some people, such as people who are blind or people with cognitive disabilities who use a screen reader.

Web sites are increasingly using more advanced and complex user interface controls, such as tree controls for Web site navigation. To provide an accessible user experience to people with disabilities, assistive technologies need to be able to interact with these controls. However, the information that the assistive technologies need is not available with most current Web technologies.

WAI-ARIA addresses these accessibility challenges by defining how information about these features can be provided to assistive technology. More specifically, ARIA provides a framework for adding attributes to identify features for user interaction, how they relate to each other, and their current state. With ARIA, an advanced Web application can be made accessible and usable to people with disabilities.

From the website:

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects with a focus on academic software for universities.  We are developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications.

This could be a helpful org for penntags 

From the website:

Mnet is a distributed file store.

A distributed file store is a shared virtual space into which you can put, and from which you can get, files.

Mnet is also an emergent network. An emergent network is one in which the important features of the network result from the interactions of nodes operated by autonomous people or organizations who do not explicitly coordinate with one another.

There are many interesting applications that can be built on top of an emergent network and a distributed file store. The first application that has been written for the Mnet project is a file-sharing application which lets you search for and download files of all kinds.

The Mnet project is a Free Software, Open Source project run solely by hackers volunteering in the public interest. It currently has no commercial sponsorship, although there is at least one company that is using related source code. See the related projects page for more information.

From the website:

Connexions is:

a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute:

• authors create and collaborate
• instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
• learners find and explore content

 

From the website:

JForum is a powerful and robust discussion board system implemented in Javatm. It provides an attractive interface, an efficient forum engine, an easy to use administrative panel, an advanced permission control system and much more.

Built from the ground up around a MVC framework, it can be deployed on any servlet container or Application Server, such as Tomcat, Resin and JBoss. Its clean design and implementation make JForum easy to customize and extend.

Best of all, JForum is freely available under the BSD Open Source license.

From the website:

• The name for the open-source licensed software developed and used by Connexions.

• An Ancient Greek adjective that refers to things stitched or sewn together.
• Software to enable authors, instructors, and students to create, select, and assemble modular educational content into collections customized to meet their teaching and learning needs.

 

Look for:

Folksonomies stand in sharp contrast to both trees and faceted systems. First, folksonomies tend to be clusters of tags, not hierarchies: There's a pile of "apple" tags and another pile of "GrannySmith" tags, but the folksonomy may not recognize that the latter is a subset of the former...

 D. Weinberger

Abstract:

The article argues that it is necessary to move e-learning beyond learning management systems and engage students in an active use of the web as a resource for their self-governed, problem-based and collaborative activities. The purpose of the article is to discuss the potential of social software to move e-learning beyond learning management systems. An approach to use of social software in support of a social constructivist approach to e-learning is presented, and it is argued that learning management systems do not support a social constructivist approach which emphasizes self-governed learning activities of students. The article suggests a limitation of the use of learning management systems to cover only administrative issues. Further, it is argued that students' self-governed learning processes are supported by providing students with personal tools and engaging them in different kinds of social networks. 

Though the overall health of the tech sector may have looked bleak a few years back---at least in the eyes of financial analysts---a blend of old and new ideas, evolving technologies, and changing cultural values have recently given the online world new vigor. With content derived primarily by community contribution, popular and influential services like Flickr and Wikipedia represent the emergence of "collective intelligence" as the new driving force behind the evolution of the Internet. 

From the website:

Abstract:

This presentation by Dr. Ana Alice Baptista, head of Odisseia, will describe several projects including:

• CRiB (Conversion and Recommendation of Digital Object Formats), a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designed to assist cultural heritage institutions in the implementation of migration-based preservation interventions. The CRiB system works by assessing the quality of distinct conversion applications or services to produce recommendations of optimal migration strategies. The recommendations produced by the system take into account the specific preservation requirements of each client institution.
• Add-ons to DSpace
  • Commenting Add-On: a set of classes, servlets and custom tags that bring informal communication capabilities to the DSpace environment. The informal communication is assured by a threaded forum that can be attached to any DSpace resource: web-page, community, collection, submitted item or e-person.
  • Ontology Add-On: a feature that allows administrators to control the set of keywords used to describe submitted items. U Minho has ported to its system the publicly-available Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computing Classification System (CCS).
  • Recommendation Add-On: a set of custom tags that provide suggestions of resources (items, e-persons and comments) related to a given selected resource.
  • Web of Communication Add-On: the 3D Web of Communication allows the user to discover hidden relationships between items, comments and people. It works by displaying a VRML 3D web of resources involved in a communication process. The user is also able to jump to specific items on the environment thus providing a 3D navigational system over DSpace.
• Social tagging: Odisseia is involved in two social tagging-related projects: 1. to find out how information retrieval is affected by the use of social tags, 2. an international collaborative effort investigate which kinds of tags are being commonly used.

 

Abstract: A self-organising system functions without central control, and through contextual local interactions. Components achieve a simple task individually, but a complex collective behaviour emerges from their mutual interactions. Such a system modifies its structure and functionality to adapt to changes to requirements and to the environment based on previous experience. Nature provides examples of self-organisation, such as ants food foraging, molecules formation, or antibodies detection. Similarly, current software applications are driven by social interactions (negotiations, transactions), based on autonomous entities or agents, and run in highly dynamic environments. The issue of engineering applications, based on the principles of self-organisation to achieve robustness and adaptability, is gaining increasing interest in the software research community. The aim of this paper is to survey natural and artificial complex systems exhibiting emergent behaviour, and to outline the mechanisms enabling such behaviours. 

Abstract: Three major components of participatory decision-making, namely knowledge, communication and reporting, are reviewed. A prototype knowledge management system based on these components is developed in the context of community forestry. The system addresses key issues such as differences in literacy levels, interests and technical capability of the participating individuals and organizations, and is structured around a hierarchical structure of Principles, Criteria and Indicators (PC&I). The system automates production of customized reports that can be prepared as hard copy documents, web pages or audio (narrated) reports on cassette and in a selected language. The reporting structure permits individuals to contribute material to interim reports and facilitates the tracking of their knowledge contribution to the decision process. These customized reports mitigate problems of information overload, as well as increasing the satisfaction of the recipients with the participatory process. The system is used as a basis for discussion of alternative system designs and issues related to interactions between humans and computers, from which a new system design philosophy of "Adaptive Knowledge Management" is developed. Crown Copyright (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 

Abstract: The practice of Weblogging as a new social and technological phenomenon in society and business is gaining a growing number of supporters. In short, a Weblog is a website where individual thoughts are publicly displayed in the form of a diary. In this paper, we seek to illustrate the impact of Weblog technology on people's passion for knowledge. We start from the assumption that successful knowledge management requires the engagement of people in knowledge-related practices. We introduce a famous agglomeration of Weblogs that deal with the development of a commercial software. Based on an exploratory study, we suggest that the specific features and character of this novel technology have an impact upon the passion for voluntary knowledge work, which is triggered by experiences of flow states, as well as extrinsic stimuli. 

From the website:

Microsoft Surface represents a fundamental change in the way we interact with digital content.

With Surface, we can actually grab data with our hands, and move information between objects with natural gestures and touch. 

Surface features a 30 inch tabletop display whose unique abilities allow for several people to work independently or simultaneously.  All without a mouse or a keyboard.

The Australian Journal of Emergency Management, Vol. 18 No. 2, May 2003

Abstract:

This paper considers the factors that relate to the
recovery of a community affected by emergency. In
particular, principles of recovery, the process of
recovery, the reactions of people affected by
emergencies, and the means by which recovery
needs might be addressed are considered. An
approach to recovery that is not strictly sequential,
but is flexible, community-centric and which is
integrated with other elements of the emergency
management process is advanced.
On 20 May 2002 the Republic of East Timor was
acknowledged by the United Nations as a country in
its own right. When interviewed, citizens of the new
country expressed relief at no longer having to live in
fear of violent militia attacks. They did however
express new concerns; concerns more characteristic
of the aftermath of a less insidious, yet equally
destructive calamity. These concerns included the
need for employment, long-term accommodation,
and economic viability. The above, in addition to the
psychological sequelae, represent some of the more
typical needs of a recovering community. Indeed, the
recovery of a community, whether from war or
cyclone, rates as one of the more complex and
lengthy challenges to confront both those affected
by the event and those called to assist the affected.
This paper considers the process of recovery. In
particular, several key principals of recovery are
considered along with the process by which the
recovery of a community occurs. In addition to the
aforementioned fundamentals of recovery
management, several other recovery issues will be
considered, including the diverse reactions to
emergencies. The question of meeting the needs of a
recovering community in terms of what is required
and who accepts responsibility for its provision will
also be addressed. Importantly, a number of
conclusions will be drawn with respect to factors that
affect recovery.

Abstract:

This paper describes an ongoing research work on developing methods for effective visualisation
support for situation analysis, decision making, and communication in the course of disaster
management. The major goals are to reduce the information load of the analyst, decision maker, or
information recipient without omission of anything important and to ensure quick and accurate
comprehending of the information. The work embraces the issues of selection of the relevant
information and defining the appropriate level of detail, data preparation (aggregation and other
transformations), and selection of the appropriate methods for visual representation depending on the
user’s tasks or communication goals, recipient’s profile, and the target presentation medium. A
practical outcome from the research will be a knowledge base that can be used to support analysis,
decision making, and information communication in emergency situations. A great part of the
knowledge, specifically, knowledge on data transformation and representation, is generic and can be
used for different applications.

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/505248.505269

Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 45 ,  Issue 4  (April 2002) table of contents
Supporting community and building social capital
SPECIAL ISSUE: Supporting community and building social capital table of contents
Pages: 37 - 39 
Year of Publication: 2002
ISSN:0001-0782

From the website:

Any system that supports groups addresses this tension by enacting a simple constitution -- a set of rules governing the relationship between individuals and the group. These constitutions usually work by encouraging or requiring certain kinds of interaction, and discouraging or forbidding others. Even the most anarchic environments, where "Do as thou wilt" is the whole of the law, are making a constitutional statement. Social software is political science in executable form.

From the website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader 

From the website:

The Course Management System products listed below have been reviewed as part of our new community-driven process.  If you have extensive knowledge of a product that is not on the list, please submit a review of the product.  If you have additional information on a product that has been reviewed, please contribute to the discussion of the product by clicking on the link on the "Forums" line of the review. 

From the website:

The Media Grid is a computational grid platform that provides digital media delivery, storage and processing (compute) services for a new generation of networked applications. Built using Internet and Web standards, the Media Grid combines Quality of Service (QoS) and broadcast features with distributed parallel processing capabilities. Together these features create a unique software development platform designed specifically for networked applications that produce and consume massive quantities of digital media. The Media Grid is powered by service providers (such as rendering farms, clusters, high-performance computer systems, computational grids, and similar systems) that furnish on-demand services to Media Grid clients (users).

From the website:

DELOS is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries partially funded by the European Commission in the frame of the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). The main objectives of DELOS are research, whose results are in the public domain, and technology transfer, through cooperation agreements with interested parties.
 

Collaborative tagging systems, or folksonomies, have the potential of becoming technological infrastructure to support knowledge management activities in an organization or a society. There are many challenges, however. This paper presents designs that enhance collaborative tagging systems to meet some key challenges: community identification, ontology generation, user and document recommendation. Design prototypes, evaluation methodology and selected preliminary results are presented.

From the website:

he second annual O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference considers what's at stake for the future of publishing for people who are passionate about books and book publishing. Most publishers know that next steps are needed—TOC helps them take the plunge and connect with the right ideas, tools, and innovators. The conference will emphasize practical/tactical information and knowledge transfer so that attendees come away armed with skills to lead change within their own organization. Learn more about TOC 

From the website:

OCTAVE is self-directed. A small team of people from the operational (or business) units and the IT department work together to address the security needs of the organization. The team draws on the knowledge of many employees to define the current state of security, identify risks to critical assets, and set a security strategy. 

From the website:

For the past five years, folks have been meeting "The Man" at Dixie's. I am a big fan of obscenely spicy sauces, and I enjoyed "The Man" --Gene Porter's high-octane special sauce. He roams the dining areas with a pan of it, serving it directly onto patron's food by request. "We can't serve it on the side or separate," notes Dixie Porter, "it's either on the meat or not at all." I asked her what's in this mighty barbecue and she says simply "it's a secret." Whatever it is, it packs a mighty punch as well as the powerful flavor of southern barbecue. 

From the website:

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

From the website:

Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents the following statistics:

• Total number of papers
• Total number of citations
• Average number of citations per paper
• Average number of citations per author
• Average number of papers per author
• Average number of citations per year
• Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
• Egghe's g-index
• The contemporary h-index
• The age-weighted citation rate
• Two variations of individual h-indices
• An analysis of the number of authors per paper.

The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a variety of output formats (for future reference or further analysis). Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics. Anne-Wil Harzing welcomes user feedback to help her improve the program.

 

From the website:

Backfire

The words, or image, of a candidate can be used against him to show that the candidate cannot be believed, has broken a promise, or has “flip-flopped” on an important issue. Based on the premise that the

 camera, or the microphone, doesn’t lie, these ads are effective because they let the candidate incriminate himself.

A series of ads from the 1956 campaign, "How’s That Again, General?", replayed excerpts from Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 commercials. Vice-presidential candidate Estes Kefauver then explained how Eisenhower didn’t keep his promises. In 1960, President Eisenhower’s words were used against Vice President Richard Nixon in the John Kennedy

 

From the website:

Splunk is the search engine for logs and IT data. It's software that indexes and enables you to search, navigate, alert and report on all the data logged by any application, server or network device in real-time.

From the website:

Mechanical Turk aims to make accessing human intelligence simple, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses or developers needing tasks done (called Human Intelligence Tasks or "HITs") can use the robust Mechanical Turk APIs to access thousands of high quality, low cost, global, on-demand workers -- and then programmatically integrate the results of that work directly into their business processes and systems. Mechanical Turk enables developers and businesses to achieve their goals more quickly and at a lower cost than was previously possible.

From the website:

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.

British soldiers captured by the Japanese during World War II are forced to construct a strategic railroad bridge which a commando team is instructed by the British High Command to destroy.

Great music...if you like whistling...

Fat man and little boy were the names given to the first 2 atomic bombs built by "The Manhattan Project". This film is the true story of their creation, and the fascinating people involved.

Contributors: Bonnie Bedelia (Actor); John Cusack (Actor); Laura Dern (Actor); Tony Garnett (Producer); Roland Joffé (Director, Author of screenplay); John C. McGinley (Actor); Paul Newman (Actor); Bruce Robinson (Author of screenplay, Author); Dwight Schultz (Actor).

It's World War II. Major Dan Kirby (John Wayne) is hard on his marines. His subordinate Captain Carl Griffin thinks the Major is overdoing it, but Kirby proves that there is a method to his madness after all.

Howard Hughs production!

This strikingly realistic film follows a devoted platoon of Marines through the terrors of war in the South Pacific.

Contributors: William Bendix (Actor); Jerry Cady (Adapter); Richard Conte (Actor); Preston Foster (Actor); Bryan Foy (Producer); Lloyd Nolan (Actor); Anthony Quinn (Actor); Lewis Seiler (Director); Richard Tregaskis (Author); Lamar Trotti (Author of screenplay).

Dramatic personal stories of the men who fought the courageous battle that was to be the Pacific turning point for the United States.

Contributors: James Coburn (Actor); Henry Fonda (Actor); Charlton Heston (Actor); Walter Mirisch (Producer); Donald S. Sanford (Author of screenplay); Jack Smight (Director); John Williams (Composer).

A musical about three sailors who have a 24-hour shore leave to enjoy New York. Chip tries but can't resist the advances of a lady cab driver; Ozzie gladly fills the role of a lovely anthropologist's "prehistoric man," and after much desperate searching, Gaby finds the model who isn't quite the glamorous celebrity he envisioned but nevertheless will do.

Contributors: Leonard Bernstein (Composer); Betty Comden (Author of screenplay, Author); Stanley Donen (Director); Arthur Freed (Producer); Betty Garrett (Actor); Adolph Green (Author of screenplay, Author); Gene Kelly (Actor, Director); Ann Miller (Actor); Jules Munshin (Actor); Frank Sinatra (Actor); Vera-Ellen (Actor).

The Hiltons are an average family living in a Midwestern town. The father of the household has waived his 3A status and enlisted to go overseas. His wife must now act as father and mother to their two daughters and keep their father's memory alive.

Contributors: Claudette Colbert (Actor); John Cromwell (Director); Jennifer Jones (Actor); David O. Selznick (Producer); Max Steiner (Composer); Shirley Temple (Actor); Margaret Buell Wilder (Author).

Rollicking wartime story of a romance between a soldier headed off to WWII and a hostess at New York City's fabled canteen.

And Kate Hepburn too...

Named for the insignia of the First Infantry Division, this World War II combat film follows a handful of young GIs and their sergeant as they battle their way from North Africa through Sicily, Omaha Beach and Belgium to the ultimate horror of the concentration camp at Falkenau, Czechoslovakia.

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Bobby DiCicco, Robert Carradine, Kelly Ward, Siegfried Rauch, Stephane Audran.

A dramatic recreation of an Allied airdrop behind German lines in Holland, and the subsequent disastrous Battle of Arnhem.

Contributors: Richard Attenborough (Director); Dirk Bogarde (Actor); James Caan (Actor); Michael Caine (Actor); Sean Connery (Actor); William Goldman (Author of screenplay); Joseph E. Levine (Producer); Richard P. Levine (Producer); Cornelius Ryan (Author).

Based on the actual experiences of World War II correspondent Lothar Günther Buchheim who follows the cruise of a German U-boat as it undergoes battle and attack to survive and return to port only to be destroyed in an air attack upon the subpens of New Rochelle in occupied France.

Contributors: Lothar Günther Buchheim (Author); Klaus Doldinger (Composer); Herbert Grönemeyer (Actor); Wolfgang Petersen (Director, Author of screenplay); Jürgen Prochnow (Actor); Günter Rohrbach (Producer); Klaus Wennemann (Actor).

Dramatization of a young girl's diary describing the lives of two Jewish families who hide in an attic for two years to avoid arrest by the Nazis.

Contributors: Richard Beymer (Actor); Frances Goodrich (Author of screenplay, Author); Albert Hackett (Author of screenplay); Millie Perkins (Actor); Joseph Schildkraut (Actor); George Cooper Stevens (Director); Shelley Winters (Actor).

The true story of a Jewish teenager who survived World War II by living as a Nazi for 7 years and through 3 countries.

Contributors: Artur Brauner (Producer); Marco Hofschneider (Actor); Agnieszka Holland (Director, Author of screenplay); Margaret Menegoz (Producer); Shlomo Perel (Author); Zbigniew Preisner (Composer); Ashley Wanninger (Actor); André Wilms (Actor).

A World War II melodrama about the escape of British and American flyers from a maximum-security German prison camp.

Notes: Based on the book by Paul Brickhill.
Aspect ratio 2.35:1.
Originally released as a motion picture in 1963.
"A commemorative 2 disc collector's set."--Container.
Special features include: disc 1. Audio commentary by director John Sturges; trivia track. Disc 2. Documentaries "The great escape: the untold story" and "The real Virgil Hilts: a man called Jones"; featurettes: "Return to the Great escape", "Preparations for freedom", "A standing ovation", "Bringing fact to fiction", and "The flight to freedom"; photo gallery; original theatrical trailer.

Cooler King!

Re-enacts the military operation of D-Day from four points of view--the workings of the high commands of the American, English, French, and German forces in their battle scheme for Normandy. Largely filmed on actual invasion sites in France.

Contributors: Ken Annakin (Director); Richard Beymer (Actor); Richard Burton (Actor); Red Buttons (Actor); Sean Connery (Actor); Mel Ferrer (Actor); Henry Fonda (Actor); Maurice Jarre (Composer); Andrew Marton (Director); Robert Mitchum (Actor); Cornelius Ryan (Author of screenplay, Author); Robert Ryan (Actor); Rod Steiger (Actor); Richard Todd (Actor); John Wayne (Actor); Bernhard Wicki (Director); Darryl Francis Zanuck (Producer).

Captain John Miller must take his men behind enemy lines to find Private Ryan, whose three brothers have been killed in combat. Faced with impossible odds, the men question their orders. Why are eight men risking their lives to save just one? Surrounded by the brutal realities of war, each man searches for his own answer and the strength to triumph over uncertain future with honor, decency and courage.

Contributors: Edward Burns (Actor); Matt Damon (Actor); Tom Hanks (Actor); Robert Rodat (Author of screenplay); Tom Sizemore (Actor); Steven Spielberg (Director, Producer).

More Bob Wills!

A forerunner to Texas Swing and Texas Blues, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys fiddled a commercial brand of down home favorites. 

From the website:

WeFi makes WiFi easy. Our software makes it easy for you to find and connect to WiFi networks. With WeFi, each user contributes to the rest of the community by using the client and discovering more networks around. All this is reported to a centralized server and shared seamlessly among all users, resulting in easy connection. With our software you can also map your favorite hotspots, find your friends, share your WiFi with other WeFi members and do many other cool things.

View enlarged image

Whether horrific or humorous, fabricated or true, countless stories accompanied enlisted Americans back home. While not all of them were appropriate dinner table topics, many provided colorful conversation pieces or, as this post-war radio broadcast demonstrates, inspiration for a song. Billed as "The Most Colorful Hillbilly Band In America," the Maddox Brothers and Rose were no strangers to radio, building a strong reputation on the airwaves before the outbreak of World War II. Like many bands, though, the family act went on hiatus for Uncle Sam before reforming after the war with a renewed vigor and, no doubt, plenty of tales to tell. On "Whoa Sailor," bassist Fred Maddox has storytelling honors for this amusingly trite account of shore leave dawdling.

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys

Interestingly enough, the demise of wartime music programs did not coincide with the end of World War II. The popular V-Disc record lasted until May 1949, while the Armed Forces Radio Service persevered through the Korean War, the rise of television and rock 'n' roll, and the start of the Vietnam conflict before folding in the late 1960's. Moreover, the atomic bomb, new military terminology, and shore leave exploits provided plenty of additional inspiration for post-war songs. For some Americans, the Japanese surrender indicated a definite closure and return to normalcy; but for others, the ways of war and the music that got them through it proved tough to purge from their systems.

The six songs presented here come from the 78 rpm and LP disc collections and the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service collection in the Marr Sound Archives.

From the IBM website:

The page-reload cycle presents one of the biggest usability obstacles in Web application development and is a serious challenge for Java™ developers. In this series, author Philip McCarthy introduces a groundbreaking approach to creating dynamic Web application experiences. Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a programming technique that lets you combine Java technologies, XML, and JavaScript for Java-based Web applications that break the page-reload paradigm.

From the website:

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments. 

From the website:

blinkx is the world's largest and most advanced video search engine. Fed by automatic spiders that crawl the web for audio video content and content partnerships with over 200 leading content and media companies, blinkx uses visual analysis and speech recognition to better understand rich media content. Users can search for content, create personal TV channels that automatically splice relevant content together. blinkx is a privately-held firm, based in San Francisco and London and was founded in early 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake.  

From the website:

Welcome to FUH2.com, home of the official Hummer H2 salute. So...why all the fuss? Well, it breaks down like this: The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle. It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it's a Chevy Tahoe in disguise. The H2 is a gas guzzler. Because it has a gross vehicle weight rating over 8500 lbs, the US government does not require it to meet federal fuel efficiency regulations. Hummer isn't even required to publish its fuel economy (owners indicate that they get around 10 mpg for normal use). So while our brothers and sisters are off in the Middle East risking their lives to secure America's fossil fuel future, H2 drivers are pissing away our "spoils of victory" during each trip to the grocery store.
The H2 is a polluter. Based on G.M.'s optimistic claim that it gets13 mpg, an H2 will produce 3.4 metric tons of carbon emissions in a typical year, nearly double that of G.M.'s Chevrolet Malibu sedan. The H2 is a death machine. You'd better hope that you don't collide with an H2 in your economy car. You can kiss your ass goodbye thanks to the H2's massive weight and raised bumpers. Too bad you couldn't afford an urban assault vehicle of your own. Or could you...? The H2 is a tax loophole. Under the current tax laws, business owners can deduct nearly half the cost of their H2s. If you are in the highest tax bracket, that's a tax savings of nearly $10,000! The government rewards you more savings for buying an H2 than you'd get for buying an electric car.

 

From the website:

Sophie's raison d'être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming. We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats. Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.

From the website:

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.

From the website:

XML::Generator::PerlData provides a simple way to generate SAX2 events from nested Perl data structures, while providing finer-grained control over the resulting document streams.

Processing comes in two flavors: Simple Style and Stream Style:

In a nutshell, 'simple style' is best used for those cases where you have a a single Perl data structure that you want to convert to XML as quickly and painlessly as possible. 'Stream style' is more useful for cases where you are receiving chunks of data (like from a DBI handle) and you want to process those chunks as they appear. See PROCESSING METHODS for more info about how each style works.

From the website:

Open Repository is a service from BioMed Central to build, launch, host and maintain institutional repositories for organisations. Built upon the latest DSpace repository software the service has been designed to be flexible and cost-effective. BioMed Central's economy of scale makes it possible for organisations that could not otherwise afford to, or lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house to run their own repositories. 

From the website:

Call them pipes, teqlos, dapps, modules, mashups or whatever else but fact is that recently we have seen a good number of new services that allow developers and users to build mini-apps and mashups that mix and re-mix data. Here we run through 5 applications that allow you to mix, rip and mash your data, looking at the data input, output, REST support, suggested use, and required skill level 

• Decode base64 strings (base64 string looks like YTM0NZomIzI2OTsmIzM0NTueYQ==)
• Decode a base64 encoded file (for example ICO files or files from MIME message)
• Convert source text data from several code pages and encode them to a base64 string or a file

From the web site:

Compass is a first class open source Java Search Engine Framework, enabling the power of Search Engine semantics to your application stack decoratively. Built on top of the amazing Lucene Search Engine, Compass integrates seamlessly to popular development frameworks like Hibernate and Spring. It provides search capability to your application data model and synchronizes changes with the datasource. With Compass: write less code, find data quicker.

As of version 0.8, Compass also provides a Lucene Jdbc Directory implementation, allowing storing Lucene index within a database for both pure Lucene applications and Compass enabled applications. Note, when using Compass, using a database as the index storage requires only updating configuration settings.

 

From the website:

Lehigh Lab provides a locus for faculty and students to advance the adoption of innovative technologies and techniques that enhance teaching, learning, and research. The Lab concept is founded upon the idea that the University as a whole is a laboratory in which faculty, staff and students work and experiment together, across departments and disciplines, to advance learning. Central to this effort is the newly-created Technology Resource Learning Center.

From the website:

The goal of MARC4J is to provide an easy to use Application Programming Interface (API) for working with MARC and MARCXML in Java. MARC stands for MAchine Readable Cataloging and is a widely used exchange format for bibliographic data. MARCXML provides a loss-less conversion between MARC (MARC21 but also other formats like UNIMARC) and XML. 

Good site on using Suse Linux on a laptop (the T4x series).  Discussion of installation for dual boot.

I might still want fedora or gentoo, but this might be worth the $45 to investigate. 

Excellent chart of component isolation.  Presentation, business, integration sit on top of the development framework and event logging capabilities.  Seriously, very nice.

Especially the last two paragraphs

From the website:

Funambol is open source mobile application server software that provides push email, address book and calendar (PIM) data synchronization, application provisioning, and device management for wireless devices and PCs, leveraging standard protocols. For users, this means BlackBerry-like capabilities on commodity handsets.

Funambol is also a software development platform for mobile applications. It provides client and server side Java APIs, and facilitates the development, deployment and management of any mobile project. Funambol is the de facto standard implementation of the Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management protocols (OMA DS and DM, formerly known as SyncML).

From the website:

This exhibition celebrates the artistic development and musical career of Marian Anderson. Renowned throughout the world for her extraordinary contralto voice, she is also remembered for her dignity and grace under pressure. Through the mechanism of recorded sound, we can continue to enjoy Ms. Anderson's renderings of Lieder and spirituals . Through the reflected light of photographs, we can glimpse the preparation and performance of her repertoire. And through the papers that she left behind, we can investigate and understand how, when, where, and with whom her life took shape, was enriched, and became enriching not only for her audiences but also for others in need.

Allows user ratings of aggretated news & events.  Not a simple 'thumbs up / thumbs down' rating, but ratings on quality, authority, balance, trustworthiness, sources...  Still in beta, but going full bore in 2007.

From the website:

To address this critical issue, NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust." Our members rate the news online, based on journalistic quality, not just popularity. Our beta website and news feed feature the best and the worst news of the day, picked from hundreds of alternative and mainstream news sources.

This non-profit community effort tracks news media nationwide and helps citizens make informed decisions about democracy. Submitted stories and news sources are carefully researched and rated for balance, fairness and originality by panels of citizen reviewers, students and journalists. Their collective ratings, reviews and tags are then featured in our news feed, for online distribution by our members and partners. 

Article about Open Content Alliance and the Internet Archive:

The New York-based foundation on Wednesday will announce a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive, a leader in the Open Content Alliance, to help pay for digital copies of collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The works to be scanned include the personal library of John Adams, America's second president, and thousands of images from the Metropolitan Museum.

The Sloan grant also will be used to scan a collection of anti-slavery material provided by the John Hopkins University Libraries and documents about the Gold Rush from a library at the University of California at Berkeley.

Nice package of portable applications.  The whole magilla will fit comfortably on a 512Mb USB key.  It has things like openoffice, firefox & thunderbird, Sage, Filezilla, and several others.  But get this, it also has XAMPP, a portable package of Apache httpd, PERL & MySQL - all configured and ready to go...

Tell me this isn't cool. 

From the website:

he Apache Directory Server is an embeddable LDAP server written in Java. It has been designed to introduce triggers, stored procedures, queues and views to the world of LDAP which has lacked these rich constructs. 

From the website:

Roller is the open source blog server that drives Sun Microsystem's blogs.sun.com employee blogging site, IBM DeveloperWorks blogs, thousands of internal blogs at IBM Blog Central, the Javalobby's 10,000 user strong JRoller Java community site, and hundreds of other blogs world-wide. Read more about Roller on the About page.

SearchTools User Experience Recommendations

While search engine pages share many interface elements with other parts of web site design, there are certain principals that you should keep in mind:

• Put a simple, reasonably long search field on every page of the site.
  
  
• Use simple words to explain the process: remove all jargon and technical terms, and make sure that any icons have labels.
  
  
• Avoid inventing a new interface, which will confuse users: take the best of the formats of the large public search engines
  
  
• Make the search forms and results pages fit into the overall design of the web site: they should use the same colors, fonts and so on.
  
  
• Include site names and navigation links into results pages, so users can see the context and structure of the site.
  
  
• Set up a special page to be displayed when the search does not find any matches in the index (see No-Matches Page Guidelines)
  
  
• Avoid surprises: clarify all automated search features, such as stemming, phonetic matching, thesaurus lookups and stopwords (see Glossary).

Northern Light Enterprise Search Engine Features

Performance. With a database indexing 5 million documents totaling 25 gigabytes of content, and using a single query server with a single software installation, Northern Light is rated at 216 queries per second with a query response time averaging 80 milliseconds.

Scalability. Northern Light can search databases of more than 50 million documents with a single software installation on a single server. (Unlike some enterprise search engine vendors that require you to add another server appliance every time you want to add as few as 150,000 documents to your database.)

Relevance ranking effectiveness. Northern Light has a unique seventeen-factor approach to relevance ranking that considers statistical text measures, hyperlink analysis, subject classification, and date - and balances all these dynamically to weight the factors based on what will be most useful for a given query. What, you ask, are statistical text measures? Well, a few examples would be the number of times the query terms are in the document relative to the length of the document, the proximity of the query terms in the document, the word order of the query terms in the document, the presence of the query terms in the document metadata, and the inverse term frequency of the query terms in the database as a whole.

Automatic classification. Northern Light has patented, proprietary technology that classifies every document in the database by subject, type, language, and source. We provide a complete 17,000-node subject taxonomy developed by our expert gang of librarians that is extensible and customizable. Our classification powers advanced search forms, vertical search applications, and our patented Custom Search Folders™ for results navigation.

Flexible query parsing. Northern Light allows keywords, Boolean expressions (all operators, compound, and nested), natural language, phrase searching, wildcards, and any combination of these.

Search on any metadata. All metadata is represented in the index, which means you can use search forms or syntax to qualify the results. Search on title, sources, documents types, etc. You can add any metadata that makes sense to your organization and search on that tag.

Security. Northern Light integrates with your network authentication, and all security protocols are observed. That means users can only access information for which they're authorized, and you can easily add and remove users.

Open API. Our search engine has well-documented API's using J2EE standards, XML search results, and JSP sample code that support the integration of Northern Light into corporate applications.

Content integration. Our published load format specification allows any file type, from any source, located anywhere to be indexed and searched. The data conversion system includes filters for Microsoft Office, PDF, HTML (including JSP and ASP), and text formats including XML.

Discovery-based crawler. Northern Light's crawler follows links on your network to discover content for indexing. The crawler connects via HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS and SMB (Windows) protocols and supports multiple authentication methods.

Administration tools. We provide a browser-based administration system that includes a basic search UI, a scheduler to manage crawling, data conversion, database loading, and a system configuration manager.

Platforms. Northern Light is available on LINUX.

This is a very nice example of the power of faceted searching. From the webiste:

MSRA SRC Toolbar is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, which is developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. It on-the-fly clusters a certain search engine's search results into different groups, and provide meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate user's browsing.

Traditional clustering techniques don't work for this problem because the documents are short, the cluster names should be readable and the algorithm should be efficient for on-the-fly calculation. Our method take the whole problem in another way and overcome the difficulties in traditional clustering method. Basically, we try to first identify salient topics by identifying distinct and independent keyword, and then classify the search results into these topics.

The following is the corresponding paper to this technology:

Hua-Jun Zeng, Qi-Cai He, Zheng Chen, and Wei-Ying Ma. Learning To Cluster Web Search Results. In Proceedings of the 27th annual international conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR'04), pp. 210-217, Sheffield, United Kingdom, July 2004. [][]

From the website:

Sakai 2.0 shipped with the capability to support web services, but with very few web service end points. Sakai 2.1 adds a number of Web Services end-points (SakaiScript). SakaiScript was led by Steven Githens and a number of developers in the Sakai community.

Can be used to script logins with security 

From the website:

RSF is an open source web programming framework, with roughly the scope of Sun's JSF. RSF is written in Java, and is built on the Spring framework. RSF features a pure-HTML templating engine named IKAT, which achieves the cleanest separation between presentation and logic yet made - build "components" using pure HTML and libraries of code rather than heavy framework base classes. RSF also features a lightweight request-scope Spring clone, RSAC, which brings the magic benefits of inversion of control into the request scope. RSF currently has integrations for Hibernate, JSR-168, Cocoon and Sakai

This could be a good model for us since it is a very very clean separation of logic from layout. Makes widgets available to <div> containers in XHTML.

"Knoxville gave Cormac McCarthy the raw material of his art. And he gave it back." by Mike Gibson

Article that gives some insight. 

Shale is a modern web application framework, fundamentally based on JavaServer Faces. Architecturally, Shale is a set of loosely coupled services that can be combined as needed to meet particular application requirements. Shale provides additional functionality such as application event callbacks, dialogs with conversation-scoped state, a view technology called Clay, annotation-based functionality to reduce configuration requirements and support for remoting. Shale also provides integration links for other frameworks, to ease development when combinations of technologies are required.

Eric Raymond's white paper on the lessons learned from open source software production.  I capture these to assist in my thinking as we go forward with PennTags development.  The Cathedral model represents a closed, commercial approach to software development while the Bazaar represents the OSS model of development.

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
   
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", Chapter 11)
   Or, to put it another way, you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
   Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus's Law".
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
    

From the website:

InCircles is a web-based communication application that uses state-of-the-art presence detection ...

 Embedded chat tool for our website.  Interesting...

From the website:

WRDS provides instant access to important databases in the fields of finance, accounting, banking, economics, management, marketing and public policy.

We provide universities with the following key benefits:

    * A Simple, yet Powerful Web Interface. We offer point-and-click access to many databases. You can research one firm or several hundred firms simultaneously. All the databases have a common interface and a consistent data format.

    * A Host of Research Applications. We offer sophisticated tools and sample programs for a variety of research, including: conducting event studies, testing asset-pricing models using Fama-French portfolios, calculating bid-ask spreads on different exchanges and securities, and much more.

    * Support from a team of PhD's and IT Specialists. Whether you use the web interface or run customized programs on our UNIX server, our staff of Phd's and programmers will answer your research and programming questions.

    * Classroom Learning Enhancements. WRDS interface is simple and straightforward. Faculty can easily integrate research data into classroom lectures and student projects.

    * Timely Updates. Our experienced IT staff converts and installs database updates, so research data can be accessed immediately. You no longer have to spend countless hours programming and decoding tapes or writing Fortran access programs.

From the website:

Featuring a high level of automation, advanced monitoring capabilities, and flexible processing options, it's the ideal solution for university-wide lecture capture, publication and management. For lecturers, the unobtrusive operation of Lectopia makes it a highly appealing learning technology. For students, 24/7 access to recordings means greater access to lecture materials for revision and concept review.

Produced at the University of Western Australia. 

Good quick description of serverless backup.  From the website:

Serverless backup over SANs requires three major components:

• The backup application itself
• The Extended SCSI Copy Command standard
• A protocol-aware, intelligent SAN appliance that can recognize protocols from many heterogeneous systems and transmit data at high speeds to the tape and DLT libraries.

With serverless backup, the data flows across the SAN directly from the disk drive to the tape device, with no data moving through the server. The enterprise servers only need to host the backup application, and the backup application determines what needs to be backed up and sends the command to a "copy agent" embedded in an intelligent SAN appliance. The intelligent SAN appliance detects the source and destination parameters, retrieves the data from the storage devices, writes it to the tape or DLT libraries, and reports completion (or status) back to the backup application.

 

From the website:

CSIRO Research engineer Dr Richard Helmer is interviewed about the wearable guitar which works by recognising and interpreting arm movements and relaying this wirelessly to a computer for audio generation. It then shows him demonstrating it.

From the website:

Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the Internet. OWL is a vocabulary extension of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and is derived from the DAML+OIL Web Ontology Language (see also DAML and OIL). Together with RDF and other components, these tools make up the Semantic Web project.

OWL represents the meanings of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between those terms in a way that is suitable for processing by software.

The OWL specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

From the website:

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a language for modelling ontologies for Web resources and the knowledge contained within them. To provide a mechanism for serialising and processing object diagrams representing knowledge, a pair of XSLT stylesheets have been developed to map from XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) encodings of class diagrams to corresponding RDF schemas and to Java classes representing the concepts in the ontologies. The Java code includes methods for marshalling and unmarshalling object-oriented information between in-memory data structures and RDF serialisations of that information. This provides a convenient mechanism for Java applications to share knowledge on the Web.

For the website:

Virtuoso is at the core a high performance object-relational SQL database. As a database, it provides transactions, a smart SQL compiler, powerful stored procedure language with optional Java and .Net server side hosting, hot backup, SQL 99 and more. It has all major data access interfaces, as in ODBC, JDBC, ADO .Net and OLE/DB.

Virtuoso has a built-in web server which can serve dynamic web pages written in Virtuoso's web page language as well as PHP, ASP .net and others. This same web server provides SOAP and REST access to Virtuoso stored procedures, supporting a broad set of WS protocols such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging and others. A BPEL4WS run time is also available as part of Virtuoso's SOA suite.

Virtuoso has a built-in WebDAV repository. This can host static and dynamic web content and optionally provides versioning. The WebDAV repository is tested to interoperate with WebDAV clients built into Windows XP, Mac OSX and others and makes Virtuoso a convenient and secure place for keeping one's files on the net. Further, Virtuoso provides automatic metadata extraction and full text searching for supported content types.

Open Virtuoso supports SPARQL embedded into SQL for querying RDF data stored in Virtuoso's database. SPARQL benefits from low-level support in the engine itself, such as SPARQL aware type casting rules and a dedicated IRI data type. This is the newest and fastest developing area in Virtuoso.

From the website:

BigOWLIM is a high-performance semantic repository, implemented in Java and packaged as a Storage and Inference Layer (SAIL) for the Sesame RDF database. BigOWLIM uses the TRREE engine to perform RDFS, OWL DLP, and OWL Horst reasoning, based on forward-chaining of entailment rules. The most expressive language supported is a combination of limited OWL Lite and unconstrained RDFS. BigOWLIM can manage billions of explicit statements on server hardware. A principle limitation of BigOWLIM is the relatively slow delete operation. The upload, reasoning, and the query evaluation proceed fast even against huge ontologies and datasets. 

The enterprise-class Open Source LDAP server for Linux. It is hardened by real-world use, is full-featured, supports multi-master replication, and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world. The Fedora Directory Server can be downloaded for free and set up in less than an hour using the graphical console.

Includes integration with active directory. 

Educause:

The week-long program, led by a faculty of senior professionals with extensive experience in managing and leading IT-related organizations within higher education, has limited enrollment, resulting in a learning environment that is highly interactive and personalized.

Shibboleth is fully supported as a custom authentication option for Blackboard Learning System on UNIX operating systems. Due to the experimental nature of the underlying Shibboleth technologies, and limited operational expertise available for Shibboleth, Blackboard recommends customers consider running a restricted, pilot implementation on a test or development server before making this feature generally available on their system.

David Wasley described the Univ. of California's testing of a Shibboleth-enabled SFX server (from Ex-Libris), Barry Ribbeck described UTH-HSC's use of a Shibboleth-enabled Blackboard Course Management System, and John Paschoud described Shibboleth use at the London School of Economics.

Project page from the University System of Maryland.

How can the libraries benefit from shibboleth?

• The most obvious and immediate benefit that the libraries could have from a shibboleth implementation is a single sign on between their services. These services include, but are not limited to, Researchport, EZProxy, SFX, ILLiad, and Aleph (the library catalog). Other services that may be included in the future are fedora, digitool and drum.
• Secure method of authentication. All communication is over SSL, secured channels.
• Patron privacy protection. Shibboleth has the ability to control the amount of information that the identity provider releases to the service provider about the patron. For instance, in order for EZProxy to authorize a user, the identity provider only has to provide that the user is a member of the institution without any personal information about the end user.
• Future integration with institutional portals and SSO. Shibboleth provides standard protocols of communications that could be implemented at the institutional level. This would allow patrons not to have to learn a separate log in for library services.
• Access control to online databases. This would require online databases to implement shibboleth as service providers, but some online resources are doing this already.

 

InCommon eliminates the need for researchers, students, and educators to maintain multiple, password-protected accounts. Online service providers no longer build and manage account provisioning systems. InCommon uses innovative Shibboleth® authentication and authorization systems to enable cost-effective, privacy-preserving collaboration among its community of participants.

Shibboleth is an Internet2/MACE project to support inter-institutional sharing of web resources subject to access controls.¹ EZproxy 3.4a contains built-in support to support that allows EZproxy to act as a Service Provider (SP), allowing EZproxy to accept user authentication and authorization information from your institution's Identity Provider (IdP) and to map that information into corresponding EZproxy authorizations.

Configuring EZproxy for Shibboleth requires careful coordination with your Identity Provider (IdP) administrator. You may need to install a separate SSL certificate that EZproxy will use when communicating with the IdP to request attribute information.

Shibboleth is standards-based, open source middleware software which provides Web Single SignOn (SSO) across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.

Penntags as a 'popular' social bookmarking site.

Introducing Bookmarkz!

By now everyone is quite familiar with the concept of social bookmarking.

I'm sure you have your favorite bookmarking website just like everyone else .. but do you have an easy way to encourage your website or blog visitors to socially bookmark your content?

Use Bookmarkz (beta) to easily add "one-click social bookmarking" links for one to thirty five ninety four popular social bookmarking websites and what's even better is it's all done with virtually no setup! How could it get any easier?

Education Commons is a virtual community of academic systems users, designers and systems implementers sharing knowledge, experiences and best practices.

The goal of the community is to create an open and transparent system of communication between diverse groups committed to advancing the state of education worldwide. It's meant to be a virtual commons, where sharing and participation are key. We encourage you to contribute your thoughts, ideas, programs and projects.

More tools...

While writing this blog a small library of reusable components based on YUI has been started. The library was namespaced YAHOO.ext (short for Yahoo! UI extensions), and already has a few very useful classes that make day to day development with YUI much easier. All of the classes are well-documented and there are some examples of using them found in the posts on this blog. The code is of course free and has the same unrestrictive (BSD) license as Yahoo! UI.

It's all about tools, baby...

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Interesting Penn site that is "the first just-in-time provider of strategic expertise to college and university leaders".  Further,

The Learning Alliance is a provider of educational research and leadership support services to presidents of accredited, non-profit two- and four-year colleges and universities. The Learning Alliance serves the mission of higher education institutions by providing its senior administrators with timely access to expertise, current research, and market data. 

WebCite® is an archiving system for webreferences (cited webpages and websites), which can be used by authors, editors, and publishers of scholarly papers and books, to ensure that cited webmaterial will remain available to readers in the future. If cited webreferences in journal articles, books etc. are not archived, future readers may encounter a "404 File Not Found" error when clicking on a cited URL.

A WebCite® reference is an archived webcitation, and rather than linking to the live website (which can and probably will disappear in the future), authors of scholarly works will link to the archived WebCite® copy on webcitation.org.

FormFacesTM is a pure JavaScript solution that utilizes AJAX techniques and can be seamlessly integrated with AJAX applications. This means that XForms+HTML can be sent directly to the browser where JavaScript transcodes the XForms controls to HTML form controls and processes the binding directly within the browser - requiring ZERO server-side processing and ZERO plug-ins.

The FormFacesTM JavaScript is compatible with browsers that implement XHTML 1.0, ECMA-262 3rd Edition, and DOM Level 2 which includes Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox, Opera, Konquerer, Safari, and NetFront. 

Empirical evidence regarding the utilization of MARC content designation in our current library information retrieval systems can contribute to discussions regarding the future of MARC and its place in the rapidly evolving networked information environment The absence of any solid empirical analysis in the past 30 years, beyond that of frequency of MARC tag use, is a major motivation for this study.

Provides information on how to do this same analysis on our own collection.  Do we want to do this? 

Used on some Blogsites to assist folks in posting to their favorite Social Bookmarking site such as delicious, fark, magnolia, and PennTags!

Website Testing: Conquering Cross-browser, Cross-platform Woes

As I was doing final cross-browser testing for a redesign of SKDesigns, my website design business, the design implementation was working quite well in nearly every mainstream browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even the Lynx text-only browser. Unfortunately, though, I found problems with three old or little used browsers, such as Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac that destroyed the CSS-positioned layout. I toiled over how to best handle these browser bugs, especially since my upcoming Web design book—currently in production at my publisher—stresses the importance of usability, readability, and degrading gracefully for older browsers. Today’s post covers part of my decision-making journey and choices of approaches for dealing with these CSS bug-riddled old and little-used browsers.

Rajant Corporation’s BreadCrumb® family of products offers instant wireless broadband connectivity, adaptability, ease of deployment, security and flexibility.

Rajant Corporation has developed wireless broadband systems and components that have multiple applications in homeland security, public safety, emergency and enterprise networking sectors. Rajant Corporation’s wireless LAN systems are portable, mobile, battery powered, meshing, self-healing, *highly secure, 802.11b access points.

The company strategy includes working with government, military, civilian agencies and first responder organizations to define customer needs and to identify or create funding sources for customers as well. Rajant has succeeded in developing both the private sector and federal customer base.

The KEEP Toolkit is a set of web-based tools that help teachers, students and institutions quickly create compact and engaging knowledge representations on the Web. With the KEEP Toolkit you can:

• select and organize teaching and learning materials.
• prompt analysis and reflection by using templates.
• transform materials and reflections into visually appealing and intellectually engaging representations.
• share ideas for peer-review, assessment, and collective knowledge building.
• simplify the technical tasks and facilitate knowledge exchange and dissemination.

ePresence Interactive Media software is a content capturing, archiving, and webcasting system that delivers video and presentation media over the internet using multiple streaming formats for multiple platforms. ePresence also supports text and voice interaction among event participants.

ePresence Interactive Media consists of ePresence Media and ePresence Live!.
ePresence Media is open source software that supports media capture, archiving, and archive access.
Members of the ePresence Open Source Consortium have a choice of two support service packages and also receive ePresence Live! code which supports real-time streaming.

Our System is unique as you can specify when rooms are free to be booked - as if there is a permanent booking. This is especially useful in a school where a room is used for a class at a certian time of the day but you wish to be able to book the room at other times when the room is available. If you wish the room to be available at all times, simply dont specify when the room is used.

Cookie based web authentication and single sign on system designed for largish intranets under a single domain where many people run their own webservers (and you don't trust them all much).

On first connection, an untrusted webserver redirects new requests for restricted pages to the idcheck server (to be authenticated). The idcheck server takes and checks the users credentials and, if successful, redirects the users browser back to the page they requested. As it redirects, the server installs a private cookie (scoped only for the idcheck webserver) and a second cookie that acts as a session cookie for the untrusted webserver (which is checked for validity, over http against the idcheck server) when downloading subsequent pages.

When the user accesses another webserver that also has idcheck restricted pages he does not need to enter his credentials again because of the private idcheck cookie indicates that he has already authenticated and so can bypass the login form. This provides a single sign on environment for multiple webservers in a single domain..

The Tacos library project provides components and ajax behaviour for the Tapestry java web application framework. Most of the functionality is based on the exceptional dojo javascript library. Thanks dojo!

It's intent is to provide a library of high quality components that may be used in your tapestry application, as well as provide a core infrastructure for using ajax related logic in these and your own components and pages.

Nice javascript library that could be helpful.  It has a widget for date and time...

KinoSearch is a loose port of the Java search engine library Apache Lucene, written in Perl and C. The archetypal application is website search, but it can be put to many different uses.

Features

• Extremely fast and scalable - can handle millions of documents
• Incremental indexing (addition/deletion of documents to/from an existing index).
• Full support for 12 Indo-European languages.
• Support for boolean operators AND, OR, and AND NOT; parenthetical groupings, and prepended +plus and -minus
• Algorithmic selection of relevant excerpts and highlighting of search terms within excerpts
• Highly customizable query and indexing APIs
• Phrase matching
• Stemming
• Stoplists

Catalyst is an elegant web application framework, extremely flexible yet extremely simple. It's similar to Ruby on Rails, Spring (Java), and Maypole, upon which it was originally based.

MVC

Catalyst follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, allowing you to easily separate concerns, like content, presentation, and flow control, into separate modules. This separation allows you to modify code that handles one concern without affecting code that handles the others. Catalyst promotes the re-use of existing Perl modules that already handle common web application concerns well.

Here's how the M, V, and C map to those concerns, with examples of well-known Perl modules you may want to use for each.

• Model

  Access and modify content (data). DBIx::Class, Class::DBI, Plucene, Net::LDAP...

• View

  Present content to the user. Template Toolkit, Mason, HTML::Template...

• Controller

  Control the whole request phase, check parameters, dispatch actions, flow control. Catalyst itself!

If you're unfamiliar with MVC and design patterns, you may want to check out the original book on the subject, Design Patterns, by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides, also known as the Gang of Four (GoF). Many, many web application frameworks are based on MVC, including all those listed above.

When it comes to testing and debugging sites, it seems that Firefox can’t be beaten. Not only does it have an inbuilt DOM Inspector and Javascript console to beat all others, but the plethora of useful extensions is unmatched. Everyone knows and uses Chris Pedericks Web Developer extension, along with any number other handy extras – Firebug, X-Ray, Aardvark, etc.

Other browsers have useful tools though, which gave me an idea for an ad-hoc series highlighting useful web development features, starting with Safari. While it doesn’t have an official plugin architecture like Firefox, that hasn’t stopped developers finding ways around it and providing excellent plugins.

Carnegie Mellon site for the Pathways project -- an NSF project to provide or augment the interface layer to repositories as exposed also in DLF aquafier