Hello all, 

As part of OpenEd13 myself and a few others have been working towards producing a new "open" search engine. The search engine only indexes content with either a public domain and / or Creative Commons license, and as such everything within it is available for reuse without any major need for copyright clearance or checking. I *think* that makes it unique.

If you'd like to stop reading now and go play http://solvonauts.org/

If you'd like to continue reading, please do

As well as being a search engine we have :-

A Moodle Repository plugin to allow you to add OERs directly into Moodle - https://github.com/solvonauts/moodle-repository-plugin

A WordPress plugin to allow you to show OER on your WordPress blog - https://github.com/solvonauts/wordpress-widget

A Chrome plugin which allows you to check for OER on a website (such as the results returned by a Google search) - https://github.com/solvonauts/chrome-metadata-plugin

The entire repository ( https://github.com/solvonauts/solvonauts ), harvesting code (https://github.com/solvonauts/solvonauts-harvesting-code) and all data (https://github.com/solvonauts/opendata)  is available on github 

All of this is open source. The goal is hopefully to allow people from all over the world (the code is internationalised) to create their own repositories and curate their own open content. The code also has a modularised structure and so can be extended relatively quickly to allow for different tools, new APIs and new features. Hopefully with some more time the site could become almost WordPress like with the ease of usage and so on, so forth.

We've tried to create a topology around the repository, focusing on promoting and encouraging reuse and repurposing. Tied into the repository is a series of APIs and tools which would allow (OAI style) for a series of repositories to talk to each other and share resources to harvest. We've also a second Moodle plugin (https://github.com/solvonauts/moodle-url-reporting-plugin) which allows the repository to visit your Moodle (should you so wish) and see if you've used any resources that we have information on. In doing so, an idea of how popular a resource is (sort of paradata) could be. Paradata could be used to influence search results, or could be displayed as per metadata.

In terms of where we can harvest / index, at present the harvesting code supports RSS (all types), ATOM, OAI (DC), FlickR API, Tumblr API, Youtube API and the Slideshare API. OER publishing seems to have moved to a publish almost everywhere (which I think is a good thing) but it makes indexing these resources properly hard.

Lots more to discuss and we've set up a community site as well to help handle this http://solvonauts.org/community/

Thanks all

Pat