Although the number of open content educational repositories and the
resources in them is steadily increasing, they still don’t get the use they
deserve. Among the main reasons for the
underuse of the Open Educational Resources (OER) repositories is the difficulty
of finding them and for searching and sharing content of interest stored in
them. The recent advancements in the Web development hold promises for
improving the repository discoverability, searchability, and shareability. From
one side, the Semantic Web offers technologies for conceptual structuring,
annotating, and indexing of educational resources that allow for efficient
semantic retrieval. From another side, the increasingly popular Social Web
offers means for sharing, distributing, popularizing, promoting and
recommending online resources. The goal of this work is to investigate the
possibilities for combining the benefits of these two approaches and for
designing a framework of a content management system that supports both.
We explored different options and software and decided to focus on
an attempt to combine the popular content management system Drupal with the a
Fedora Commons repository, which would provide a Drupal-based front end
enabling an intuitive interface, and rich functionalities for supporting
individual users and communities and a Fedora-based backend that enables the
use of Semantic Web technologies. To test our approach we decided to develop a
bookmarking application.
The thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter 2, after a brief
discussion of the Semantic Web technologies, we present the Fedora Commons
framework, which utilizes such technologies for creating digital
repositories. Fedora (Flexible
Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) is architecture for storing,
managing, and accessing digital content in the form of digital objects. Fedora
is a semantically rich environment which uses features like ontologies, RDF,
RDF Schema, OWL, and the Semantic Web Query language. Chapter 3 presents the
content management system Drupal and the Social Web functionalities it
supports. Chapter 4 describes the integration of Drupal with Fedora Commons
mentioning some possible approaches and presenting in detail the approach we
have chosen - through the use of the software Islandora. Islandora is a Drupal
module which can be linked to Fedora repository. Chapter 5 gives a detailed
view on the prototype development of
the Drupal-Fedora based Bookmark repository, including user requirements, system architecture design, and
implementation.
