I've got a prototype eXistDB server, built as a WebObjects application, running on an iMac on my desk. Works pretty well, and it does some great XQuery stuff. I've entered the CAREO metadata, current as of a week ago, so it's got 3733 IMS LOM records to play with.

Check it out.

It has a simple search (just enter a term and hit the button), as well as a generic XQuery entry panel. Feel free to experiment on any XQuery statements you want (do a simple search and look at the source HTML for the result page for a starting point...) Go ahead and try some funky boolean searches like "earth image satellite". Still some refinements left to go (like limits on search results - it's currently possible to return the entire database as a result of a query - not recommended). I also have to play around with handling multiple schema - IMS LOM, DublinCore, MPEG7, IMS CP, METS, ... for both querying and retrieval.

I've been trying to be offline for the last few days (and will keep trying until Jan. 5, when I'm Back In The Office). I'll likely be lurking online, though.

Took Evan to see Santa last night. He has been fine with Santa before - sat on his knee several times, for lotsa photos - but last night, he decided that Santa Is Evil. Crying and fussing must be associated with attempted Santa Knee Sittings. Oh, well... It was still pretty cute.

Looking into techniques to allow us to decentralize user management in cross-institutional (and non-institutional) software, such as APOLLO.

Here are some links I've come across on the topic:

• Towards Federated Identity Management - Andre Durand
• Federated identity, PingID and standards cartels - Dan Farber
• Federated Identity Face-Off - Interview by Stuart J. Johnston and Dan Ruby
• SourceID Wiki - open source identity management
• Topology of Federation - Ping Identity Corporation
• What's Federated Identity Management? - eWeek Magazine
• Novell Explains Federated Identity - NetworkWorldFusion Magazine
• Primer: Federated Identity Management - Baseline Magazine
• Liberty Alliance

Many of these articles look like corporate shovelware "Read about how smart we are - give us money" but maybe there's some good stuff in there, too.

I've spent the morning building a prototype WebObjects app to act as an xml metadata server. I've embedded eXistDB into the application, and it created the necessary database files and indices for me.

Then, I wrote a short method to import xml documents from a path (and added the added bonus of importing a whole directory if that was given). 3600+ records in the embedded database.

And boy, is it fast. Queries are almost instantaneous (~100ms typical), but document retrievals are a wee bit slower, increasing linearly with the number of hits. I haven't added any limits, so you can do a query for something lame like "*a*" and get the whole database back in one page.

One of the really cool things about eXist is the XPath extensions for fulltext searching. They mimic (using XPath) the stuff that is done in XStreamDB via XQuery.

I can do stuff like:

document(*)//text() &= "*image*"

and eXist will return me any xml document (from it's entire set of collections) that contains the string "image" somewhere in it (could be in /lom/general/title/langstring/Images Of Bangalore, or /lom/technical/format/image/jpeg, or whatever. It doesn't care. And, it's very fast.

I initially sent this as an email to the group, but thought it might serve better on the weblog...

I've been playing around with eXist today. Holy crap.

I used Rob's JUD export script to suck all 3600+ records out of the CAREO JUD (took almost 2 hours to process that), then ran the import function on eXist (took maybe 5 minutes to import them all).

It looks like it's going to be able to do some pretty freaky stuff, search-wise. I've been playing around with some pretty loose XPath queries, and it returns excellent hits, pretty darned fast. It can be slow if I request, say, all documents with the letter "a" in them somewhere, but for normal queries, it's stinky fast.

With the help of a whole cast of characters, we've got our "reference implementation" Pachyderm project server up and running. It's just a clone of SFMOMA's Making Sense of Modern Art production server, so we may need to clean out some data and media, but it's working (apparently) well.

I've tried creating a new presentation (a Zoom Screen of an Ansel Adams photo), and the creation process went quite smoothly. I'm having some trouble actually viewing the result, but that's probably a minor thing.

We've been slowly adding to the number of weblogs here at the Learning Commons. Heck, at least one of them is active, too!

I wanted a way to have a single page with all of the latest posts sorted by date, from all weblogs.

RSS wouldn't quite do it. It would sort first by weblog, then by date. Not what I needed.

Blagg + Blosxom sorta does what I wanted, but relies on creating cached text files from the various weblogs. Redundant, and icky.

Thanks to Al Delgado for the tip on this. There's a big education bloggers shindig in San Francisco November 22-23. Sounds like it will be quite a gathering.

I hadn't heard of (or if I've heard of it, I promptly forgot about it) the EdBloggers Network. K-12 focussed, with colleges of education participating.

I'll be keeping an eye on this group... (no, not in a scary restraining-order kind of way...)

I participated in the last CanCore conference call (and promptly forgot to post about it. doh.). One of the items that made its way onto the agenda was to discuss my proposal of adding multiple elements in a lom to support thumbnail images and various formats of a single learning object.

Anyway, I've captured the conclusion of the group, and appended them to my proposal document.

Long story short: survey says "use the relation element, since it's part of the LOM already. it ain't as elegant or as useful as multiple technical elements, but at least it doesn't break anything."

MT-Blacklist RULES! I installed version 1.5, and it’s been saving this weblog from hundreds of unsolicited, unwelcome, and unwanted comment spams!

If you run a MT weblog, you REALLY have to install this bad boy. Right now.

Here’s a screenshot of a small, small part of my MT log. This weasel tried several times over the course of a few hours, hammering repeatedly in bursts within seconds of each other (I can only assume it was some kind of software following Google links…)

Back when I was building the "theme engine" for CAREO, everything began to look like themable stuff. I kept saying "Hey, that's not hard - we can just implement that as a theme in CAREO!"

Everything from a version of the Learning Commons website, to SciQ, to a bunch of other projects, were mocked up (and some even implemented) as themed components in CAREO.

Worked pretty well, and was an awesome test of the flexibility of the theme engine.