On 15 Nov 2006, at 15:46, Robert Tansley wrote:
> I'll see your late-nineties buzzword and raise you a "Web 2.0 mashup":
>
> http://labs.di.tamu.edu:8080/geofolios/browse-title
> http://dspace-dev.anu.edu.au/dspace-xmlui/handle/1030.58/19507/
> browse-title?browseBy=places
>
> Courtesy of Texas A&M and the Australian National University. Plus
> Google Maps and some other startup I forget the name of....
The geo interfaces demonstrated above are really compelling examples
of what modern interface components can do to a repository, and they
certainly help to add value to a local collection over its
aggregation into an anonymous search engine listing, like Yahoo or
some other recent startup whose name escapes me :-)
But what are the implications for developing the repository itself?
Am I right about the following:
The plain old DSpace interface is constructed as follows:
(a) obtain a set of items from a search or browse request
(b) create an HTML list
(c) for every item in the DSpace set, create a linked HTML list item
using the title and URI properties from the DSpace item
The whizzy new DSpace interface is constructed as follows
(a) obtain a set of items from a search or browse request
(b) create an HTML Yahoo Map
(c) for every item in the DSpace set, create an HTML Yahoo Map item
using the title, URI and long/lat properties from the DSpace item
In other words, the underlying repository doesn't really have to
break sweat to take advantage of the new interface components, it
just needs some reconfiguration to emit new HTML elements. If this is
true, could any repository manager (arXiv, CDSWare, DSpace, EPrints,
Fedora) adopt these Web 2.0 interfaces? Or was there some proprietary
Yahoo/Google code/knowledge licensed in these projects?
--
Les Carr
PS I really, really like those repository interfaces. I hope this
posting doesn't sound too envious, but If you can think of a way to
make a repository full of electronics research papers look cool,
please let me know :-) I can't use the map because they were
unfortunately all written at the same place - although I could find
out which research topics have their conferences in the nicest resorts.
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