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Specification of the Stellar OA
From Stellar Deliverable 6.1
Contents |
1 The domain
The domain of an OA is de facto characterized by the metadata used to describe the resources it provides. This characterization is a classical problem for librarians, it is solved in a rather stable and consensual way in classical scientific areas; especially those at the origin of the OAI. In the case of research on TEL this issue is more delicate first because of the multidisciplinary nature of the field, second because of the lack of clear consensus on these metadata when trying to characterize concepts, problems, theories and methodologies which have been coined to address specific TEL problems. Actually, in this young and still emerging domain the set of keywords evolves constantly, with elements appearing and disappearing rapidly. Moreover, there is sometimes not a clear and commonly shared definition of the keywords either because of the difficulty of a scientific consensus, or because of the idiomatic resonance in the different languages and epistemological traditions.
For example, one may ask why “collaborative learning” and “collaborative interactions” are both needed, or that “automatic generation of exercises” is not a keyword, or why “gestural skill training” is a keyword when it could be replaced by “gestural skill” and “training”. But on these issues completely different opinion could be expressed. There is not a clear way to decide what the best choice is. Then a pragmatic position was adopted based an analysis of the activities and priorities of the founders of the OA, and an analysis of the keywords shared by a significant number of conferences and journals which are recognized by the community for their quality and relevance to research on TEL. Still a door is left open to other propositions via “free keywords”. This list of keywords freely proposed by users grew very quickly, but some of these keywords are used just once. Those which are used frequently enough are considered as good candidates to be included in the first list (so-called “compulsory keywords). When a user upload a new resource, the rule is that he or she allocate to this resource at least one keyword from the first list; the so-called list of compulsory keywords.
2 Compulsory metadata and keywords
We provide below (See Appendix 1 A.) the list of the compulsory keywords presently available in TeLearn and which will be used to initiate the list of the STELLAR keywords.
3 Stellar update
The compulsory keywords have been submitted (in a flat alphabetical order) to the STELLAR members, with the request to express any general comment or suggestion on the list. We got comments on the coherence of the existing list and its construction. To take into account these comments (evoked above) will need a serious scientific work in which we will engage in cooperation with the scientific work packages of STELLAR. We also got propositions from STELLAR members, researchers from the Bristol, Genoa, Grenoble, Lausanne and Nottingham teams. They have suggested additional keywords based on an analysis of the evolution of their research in their specific TEL sub-domains. This results in a list of new keywords which we will process to extract new standard ones for the description of the TEL research area (See Appendix 1 B).
One additional suggestion we may make is of adding as compulsory keywords those words which define the scientific program of STELLAR, that is: Connecting learners, Orchestrating learning, Contextualizing virtual learning environments, Instrumentalizing learning contexts.
4 Specification of the archive service
The Stellar OA will implement the notion of “instance” of the existing TeLearn OA. An instance is a full-featured subset of an OA that comes in its own portal. This portal has its own (web) address and style. The subset of resources it handles is based on a ‘collection’. A collection is built by stamping resources. So, any resource added to the archive via the Stellar instance receives automatically a Stellar stamp and thus joins the Stellar collection. And thus any functionality from this instance applies to this collection. The Stellar collection is also visible from the TeLearn portal. The look of the site has been tailored toward Stellar style, inspired by the Stellar web site. The Stellar OA has been set up at the URL http://oa.stellarnet.eu (alternatively http://openarchive.stellarnet.eu/). The following figure shows a homepage screenshot.
The STELLAR instance is also experimental regarding the way such a portal will take care of e‐science development and include more and more web 2.0 features. As a first step, in order to enable quick reaction and social interaction about scientific topics, every resource is attached to potential discussion threads via a blog or a forum entry (see figure below). The users will choose the modality of interaction or annotation they want.
When following the link “Join the blog” attached to a paper, the user will be directed to the thread of the Stellar OA scientific blog where he or she will find comments from the other users and will have the possibility to post his or her own comments as well as a reaction to existing comments. If a more precise and dynamic discussion is needed, a better tool will be the forum attached to the paper and accessible in the same way as the blog.
The main features of the TeLearn archive do apply to the Stellar instance and are recalled in Appendix 1.
Links
RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) are provided to follow in real‐time the depot actuality for any kind of resource.
(e.g. http://oa.stellarnet.eu/resource.rss?lastpublications).
An RSS feed is available for every collection.
(such as http://oa.stellarnet.eu/resource.rss?lastpublicationsbystamp_[stamp name] )
Moreover, each blogs and forum do provide also RSS feeds.
URLs for the resources are static ones so that they could be safely and durably disseminated. For instance when a given publication has number [num] and version number [ver] in the database, the resource address will be:
http://oa.stellarnet.eu/open‐archive/browse?resource=[num]_v[ver]