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Cr8It
Cr8it (Crateit) is an owncloud plugin that can bundle together or 'crate' files from a user's OwnCloud (not sure about shared stuff yet) and:
- Now:
- Export as a zip (with files grouped together using the Bagit specification)
- Export as EPUB
- In the future:
- Deposit/publish crates and file to repositories
- Institutional research data repository (such as DSpace)
- Learning object repository
- Blog/CMS (that's a kind of repository if you think about it)
- Crates will have extensive human and machine-readable metadata as per the 'Data Crate' work we've been doing at the University of Western Sydney.
- Deposit/publish crates and file to repositories
During November 2013 we're doing some concentrated work on Cr8it at the University of Western Sydney and Newcastle, using developers from Intersect to help out.
The scope of a v0.1 release is covered here.
There are two main drivers for this work.
- Our research communities have large volumes of data, which are sitting on file-shares (or worse, on desktops and thumb-drives) with no metadata, and no preservation strategy. We need a way to identify what is important and why, label and group data an deposit it in repositories for archiving and dissemination (ie advertising its existence and publishing it to appropriate authorized audiences).
- Our teaching community is making a rapid move to Blended Learning practices where classroom interaction is supported with electronic online and offline resources and interactivity. Not to mention that the university has just bought several thousand iPads for students and staff. There is a growing requirement to manage large amounts of electronic content, and to be able to publish it in consistent, standardized ways across multiple platforms.
On the face of it, these things might not seem to be related but the same application framework can assist both.
To support researchers trying to sift through large volumes of files the eResearch team plans to provide a web application that can show the contents of those files using web-versions, or previews of them, including stuff like Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations in addition to image, video, audio and research specific formats. The idea is to provide file sharing services to support teams, and then to expose those resources via a web site in a way that makes it easy to discover what is there.
The connection to learning? Having web-versions of resources is precisely what’s needed to support Blended Learning, too. The web is the basis for cross-platform materials distribution, and the starting point for e-books as well.
Being able to identify sets of resources and package them together is a shared requirement again, to create data sets for research, and to create sets of learning materials.
To make this really useful we (the eResearch team at the university of Western Sydney) are planning to work on:
- Helping extend OwnCloud so it can generate and cache web-ready previews and/or renditions of any kind of file, including extracting metadata using a plugin architecture (starting with Office documents being transformed into HTML). See a discussion of whether we might want to build a 'Caching Conversion Server'.
- Helping improve OwnCloud's Lucene index so it can do full text and metadata searching across all files (including shared files, with appropriate permissions observed).