Leslie Carr wrote:
> You're absolutely right martin, but this is what I meant about "losing
> the point". Eventually we start to say "put data in, get data out,
> everything is a database", or even more alarmingly " you've got inputs
> and you've got outputs, everything is a program". It's that
> over-abstraction that dogs computer scientists and reduces your pet
> system to a really compact, easy to understand formalism that does
> precisely nothing :-)
>
:-) Yes, I'm reminded of a repositories session at a past JISC-Cetis
conference, where the director of a JISC data centre insisted that at
the end of the day, repositories were "just a database". In one sense
of course, (s)he was right, but in the case of intraLibrary, it is a
database consisting of 82 highly normalised tables, managed/accessed
with software built from roughly 150,000 lines of well-factored code,
covered by over a 1000 unit tests! I won't start listing all the
services, interfaces, specs etc.
>> However, at the end of the day, the actual solutions people need
>> depend heavily on the type of work they do, the type of material they
>> deal with, and the standards, legislation etc that apply to their domain.
> That's right - it's these differences that are crucial. The particular
> solution is a kind of database that is persistent, manageable, provides
> extensible metadata, offers public views...
Yes, its also these bits that take most of the work to support - see
above ;)
> There's one overwhlemingly common system that we haven't covered that we
> ought to describe - a workstation's file system. It does storage and
> retrieval and update and metadata (extended attributes) and indexing
> (desktop search), and it definitely figures somewhere in ourr
> cacluations because it's what everyone uses for their day to day
> activities in universities.
Yes. I remember Scott Leslie once referring to a USB data stick he was
using to transfer some content packages between laptops, as a "Learning
Object Repository", which that day it was. Can't search it via SRU
though ;).
The best overview I know of the full range and scope of what we call
"repositories" is Blinco and McLean's "Wheel of Fortune",
http://www.rubric.edu.au/extrafiles/wheel/main.swf
--
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Martin Morrey, Product Director, Intrallect, http://www.intrallect.com
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