Projects

Listed here are projects under development by O.K.I.s contributors and affiliates that are helping to move forward the vision and goals of O.K.I. .  Click on the links in the side-bar to learn more about each one.

Prepare for the transition of the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.) from a project at MIT to a sustainable community organization, which will be either internal or external to MIT. Create and implement the on-going structure and processes by which O.K.I. growth and development can occur in an efficient and cost-effective way.

II. Principal Investigators

The PIs of the O.K.I. Phase II project consist of representatives of the organizations that have helped to instigate and define O.K.I. Phase II.

• Vijay Kumar, MIT
• Llorenc Valverde, UOC

III. The O.K.I. Mission:

Foster interoperability among educational, business, commercial and open-source software used in different and evolving enterprise and personal computing environments.

IV. Accomplishments to date:

1.    O.K.I. has developed a suite of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), which are specifications that define a “Service-Oriented Architecture”.  Several institutions are using these specifications as an enterprise architecture and integration strategy.

2.    OSIDs have been applied to integrate many educational applications with a variety of content publishers and have become a globally accepted strategy for repository integration.

3.    O.K.I. has created, and is still a focal point of, a growing and active repository integration community.

4.    O.K.I. is supporting its global community of adopters through educational resources in the form of documents, presentations and seminars.

 V. Project Goals:
   
1.    To develop, demonstrate and implement the specifications of O.K.I. to realize sustainable educational opportunities and actively identify new opportunities that would benefit from O.K.I.’s successful models, processes and influence.

2.    Extend the functionality of O.K.I.’s interoperability specifications and increase their adoption to meet the requirements of more complex and varied educational applications critical to the community.

3.    Develop O.K.I. into a sustainable organization which has increased investment and increasing awareness and creditability.

4.    Use the example of the successful efforts to date with Content Repository interoperability using OSIDs as a model to build additional communities around other OSIDs of critical interest for educational applications.

5.    Evolve the OSID specifications to achieve a higher degree of interoperability and meet the changing requirements of the community.

6.    Provide more high-quality educational material on software interoperability and the application of OSIDs to better support the growing OSID developer community

7.    Improve community collaboration to ensure active problem-solving and to extend the network effect of O.K.I.

VI. Essential O.K.I. Sustainment Activities and Key Project Deliverables:

1.    Develop the organizational, funding and membership modelts for a steady-state O.K.I. community organization, including securing additional investment in key transition activities.

2.    Clarify and resolve key Intellectual Property and licensing issues, for example: “who owns the OpeniWorld brand?”, “Can the IP for the OSIDs themselves be transferred to an external entity?”, etc…

3.    Develop marketing tools, documents and events which will:
•    Bring new customers and investors into the community;
•    Provide a means to share information amongst users;
•    Market the O.K.I. Transition project and resulting community organization;
•    Help prospective users understand how O.K.I. will solve particular technical problems; and
•    Assist in event development and management

4.    Develop a more reliable and functional O.K.I. Website
•    Identify a service provider for the O.K.I. website;
•    Redesign the O.K.I. website to support the O.K.I. community in an interactive fashion (the site is currently broken); and
•    Update the content of the website and keep current as a primary source of information and support for current and prospective users.

5.    Engage customers in determining the components of an OSID distribution.
•    Develop appropriate manuals and technical documentation for O.K.I. OSIDs
•    Explore additional developer resources, such as example code and test harnesses

6.    Engage the community in refining, publishing and ratifying Version 3 of the OSIDs

8.    Determine the process for creating and registering “type” agreements. Type agreements are a community-specific requirement of the OSID specification.

9.    Determine process for creating and validating language bindings of the OSIDs, i.e. PHP and Java.

10.    Identify and secure additional self-funded projects, which will benefit the O.K.I. community.

VII. Timeline

By December 2008 it is expected that a community organization and institutional programs will be established indicating the successful conclusion of this project as well as O.K.I.’s ongoing sustainment.

The CAMPUS project, promoted by the Secretaria de Telecomunicacions i Societat de la Informaci%uFFFD (STSI) of the Generalitat de Catalunya, is born from the will of eight Catalan universities of having a virtual campus in free software and under the license of GPL (General Public License). This campus should allow offering higher education both in a completely online fashion and combining online and offline.

This initiative wants to become an international reference in the field of e-learning because %u2013 among other issues %u2013 it will support up to 10,000 users connected at the same time and its user interface will be designed following user-centered designed methodologies; taking into account issues such as usability, accessibility and content personalization.

The CAMPUS was born within the Catalan universities system and will be open to the world. The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya is responsible of the coordination and the technological leadership of the project and will be developed taking advantage of the knowledge and experience that each partner can bring to it.

This project is part of the Digital University program promoted by STSI. The goal of the program is to facilitate the transmission and sharing of knowledge via the information and communication technologies.

The CAMPUS is developed by several groups from the Catalan universities and its duration is of 18 months from the 1st of April of 2006, when the development of the project was officially opened.

For more information please visit the Campus Project web site.

The Harmoni Project is an effort led by the Curricular Technologies group at Middlebury College to build an application framework and standards-based infrastructure bus to support the rapid development and easy maintenance of curricular it projects. The project is built entirely using PHP’s OOP (Object Oriented Programming) model, allowing the framework code to be easily extended and enhanced.

At the core of the Harmoni Application Framework is an implementation of The Open Knowledge Initiative’s (O.K.I) Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs). The OSIDs are a standard service-oriented API that defines a broad set of services that are germane to IT projects in the education field yet also fitting for broader uses. Among the services defined in the OSIDs are the following:

• Authentication
• Authorization
• Agent/Group Management
• Hierarchy
• Id Management
• Repository

While Harmoni is a modular framework of which most any component can be used in a stand-alone way, the built-in OSID implementation provides a core of services that will serve most applications’ needs for user-management and authorization, with the Repository providing many data storage and retrieval needs.
The PHP bindings to the O.K.I. OSIDs are maintained by Harmoni project leader, Adam Franco. Please also see the PHP OKI Community part of this wiki for more information on projects, techniques, and developments in using O.K.I. in PHP.

For more information, please visit the Harmoni web site.

Projects:

O.K.I. Phase II
The Campus Project
Harmoni
Digital Marketplace