By My first parallel session of the day and easily the best lecture/workshop of the day was talking about XCRI-CAP. I chose to do this one because I know the Web Development team had already done a sprint on it. Whilst I knew the general idea and what XCRI could provide, I never really discussed or investigated the purpose of it, what others found with it and generally the history. Even though I am not involved in the project right now, I hoped to better understand the whole thing from this workshop as it will likely affect departmental publishers within the next 18 months.
At the beginning of the session we noted some of the core issues surrounding finding course information of university websites:
– Difficult to find course information (corporate site or school site)
– Information is usually out of sync
– Multiple databases with different information
– Not sure who owned the content.
– Lots of missing content
XCRI-CAP is designed to help organise and standardise course information in an XML format but XCRI as a whole is designed to help with all of the above by assisting with business processes and procedures.
The entire idea and purpose is focused around consistency. This mainly revolves around the content between each degree at a university and also the output of course information on the main site, school site, Moodle pages etc etc. It is about creating a web service that is standardised, fully supported and can be used in many systems and situations preventing outdated and inaccurate information.
The XCRI website assists with implementing this with a range of tools including providing an aggregator tool (which allows you to directly compare other XCRI feeds to see if your course has similar content, length of content or fields in comparison to other universities), and in the future build an application freely available which provides course information for Android and iOS users that can be branded by the institutions.
The whole idea is to provide consistency, predictability in format and ease of use. It looks great and seems to fall in line nicely with our current model of using external systems/web services to provide data feeds and using Pantheon to pull in those feeds. (as a side note it’s nice to see that most of the Universities here are using a similar model as us although instead using a CMS rather than static HTML).
Overall it was a great talk. A nice background to XCRI-C and nice to see its future capabilities and what the XCRI team and open source community want to provide in the future.