Google Summer of Code 2008: OLAT Tagging Project

About

This wiki arised from my application to the Google Summer of Code 2008 Project "Tagging" powered by OLAT. In order to provide an ongoing development and information flow amongst all groups of interest this wiki has started out to provide project details, plans , schedules and further more aspects on the ongoing development process.

OLAT Project Description

Create a tagging infrastructure within OLAT, so that arbitrary data elements can be tagged. This infrastructure will then serve in a next step to offer Web2.0 social software features within OLAT. Tags should be hierarchical and there should be the possibility for tags per user and administrator predefined tags.

Design and implement a tagging data structure and use the infrastructure on a prototype.

After successful completion of the project you will know about data structures used in social software today.

Abstract

It is widely understood that the most important skills of the future would be communication skills. Today everyone is able to access vast amounts of data without a mediator. Critical thinking skills are needed as a productive and positive activity and traditional ways of learning are challenged by social web and Wikipedia applications like OLAT where learners teach and teachers learn.

This social aspect is one of the main objectives the Web 2.0 technologie promotes. From wikis, blogs, news feeds and multimedia over ajax, soap, rss and xml to usability, participation, convergence and folksonomy - this new approach of thinking needs a reliable way to meet the new requirements that pop up when a social network grows.

With OLAT having more than 25'000 users and more than 1000 courses there is a need to manage information in a structured and user friendly way. The approach of tagging objects on a social platform is a step forward to a more intuitive information handling. In order to let OLAT make a benefit of this aspect there's the task of developing a robust and reliable tagging data structure as a basis for the information qualification process. Within this project I will investigate existing tagging solutions applicable to OLAT and develop a hierarchy of tagging classes to be applied on courses, learning objectives and arbitrary items in general.

Details

1. Requirements analyze (finished)
2. Solution approach design (finished)
3. Code Development (finished)
4. Testing (finished)
5. Deployment
6. Support

Authors

Project Engeneering and Programming: Marcel Karras (E-Mail)

Progress

For any detailed project progress information or status reports please refer my Time-Sheet page.