The Application Portfolio Management challenge

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

The paper presents a model for academic libraries for the next 20 years. The parts of the model are: 1.) Complete the migration from print to electronic collections; 2.) Retire legacy print collections; 3.) Redevelop the library space; 4.) Reposition library and information tools, resources, and expertise, and 5.) Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content. The interactions of the parts of the model and organizational issues for implementation are explored.

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 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.

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

 

Nothing like a framework to ease your burden.  Check it out, more than 50 java development frameworks are described and linked.  Of course the usual suspects are here: Cocoon, Struts, and Java Server Faces.  But also includes Tapestry, RSF, ZK and JAT.  Wow, glad we are finally moving into this space...

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.

 

Equipment list of Linux cluster, connecting hardware, software, etc

Details of the Research and Academic Computing Computing cluster at Indiana University

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. 

Educause learning initiative conference.  Tracks on emerging technologies & practice, mobile learners, next gen learners.  Looks interesting.

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.

Interesting site for edu namespace projects to have a web presence. It's how DLF Aquifer will present itself on the web.

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.

Server virtualization.  Are we considering this?

I got to love a manifesto.  Especially one that pushes for a different model of programming that works the way I think we need to work.  We are small, we are pulled in many ways, we are challenged, we are overworked...  We need to try this more formally.

Cool set of webservices that can be incorporated into websites such as: feed information, google suggest, movie reviews, etc.  Delivered in xml and super fast.  Check it out for use on our site.

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. 

Cited in the Trinkle article.

Dennis A. Trinkle's article on a model for developing a teaching & learning infrastructure that is transformative.

Times magazine article on scanning the library and how this is tranformative.  Adam gave me this heads-up as a "good introduction to tagging and scanning for the layman".

We'd need the Helix server, Helix proxy, and Helix DRM.  This would let us design a full blown service.  We should base it on Windows servers and connect to a large, fast disk array.  For now, a single scale system would be fine with, say, 25 streams.

Review of a survey to Campus IT leaders on trends facing Universities.  Interesting that security & identity mgmt is highest on the list.  Also reviews other surveys from other publications such as the Chronicle, Gartner, and CIO...

Interesting essay on trends "that are affecting the development of the next generation library.  Rest assured that these are not the only trends, but ones that have been selected to give clear insight into the rapidly changing technologies and equally fast changing mindset of library patrons."

A pilot experiment to develop a user interface for accessing digital library resources from within the Sakai

Groovy, thanks John!  Excellent site on prepping for DSpace planning, architecture, implementation, etc...

Interesting service from Microsoft.  Looks like they would help indexed licensed content too.  Maybe this is the federated search engine we are really looking for.  Here's what they say: 

Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas.

Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer.

Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution.

We have built several features designed to help you rapidly find the content you are searching for including abstract previews via our preview pane, sort and group by capability, and citation export. We invite you to try us out - and share your feedback with us.

NC States project page -- the public page at least.

This project contains things to consider for our strategic plan.

Open Student Television Network. Open, Internet2 student produced, television network. http://www.ostn.tv

“Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine... restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor?” -Paul Bonner, The Herald-Sun

“Bound By Law lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield.” -Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic's heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean 'Rights Monster' - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.” -Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online

I love lists!  Here's a nice list of how to program.

1. Do not expect a detailed specification.
2. Do not spend your time polishing a detailed design.
3. Keep your eyes on the real problem.
4. Have a team of smart guys.
5. Keep the complexity of your decisions down.
6. Do not optimize your code without solid reliable data.
7. Do not code "till it's done".
8. Start debugging while designing.
9. Do not flatter yourself that your system is bug-free.
10. Do not expect to create a perfect documentation.

 

Helix Server is the only multi-format, cross platform streaming server for delivering the highest quality experience to wired and wireless devices.

AJAX based word processor and sketch apps.

The OAICat Open Source Software (OSS) project is a Java Servlet web application providing a repository framework that conforms to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) v2.0. This framework can be customized to work with arbitrary data repositories by implementing some Java interfaces. Demonstration implementations of these interfaces are included in the webapp distribution.

A looooong list of web 2.0 thingies.  Good reference for such things as bookmarkers, audio sharing, collaboration, etc, etc, etc

The OAICat Open Source Software (OSS) project is a Java Servlet web application providing a repository framework that conforms to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) v2.0. This framework can be customized to work with arbitrary data repositories by implementing some Java interfaces. Demonstration implementations of these interfaces are included in the webapp distribution.

Article about how to design a homepage.  Start on the inner pages first so that the container pages articulate well with the results pages

The 2006 Horizon Report, just as has been the case with previous editions of the report, highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years.

A central focus of the discussion of each technology is its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression. Live weblinks to example applications are provided in each section, as well as to additional readings.