ORBIT/Development

This page brings together a number of resources describing the development of the ORBIT wiki as a work in progress. It is not comprehensive, but is intended as an illustrative guide to some of the issues we've faced, particularly with a view that our learning might prove useful to other OER and MediaWiki projects.

Google Docs

We used google's ability to 'scrape' tables to extract information from our Wiki, and manipulate it in a spreadsheet...

With very little on the Wiki initially, our main objective was to track incoming resources without 'swamping' the wiki with incomplete (or wireframed) pages. As a result, at this stage we used Google Spreadsheets to keep track of resources, their status, provenance, and other information which appears in the Resource Info table which appears on every resource's page.

Table Scraping

As the project progressed, the wiki became more complete, and the 'status' levels of resources more complex - with some resources requiring longer to gain permissions, others considered strong enough to go up on the wiki but - if time - would benefit from some editing, and others considered finalised (in so far as that's ever true on a Wiki!). At this later stage a decision was made to try and embed as much of the data from google docs into the wiki tables as possible. This was for a few reasons including

1. To maintain a clear - and public - record of provenance, reasoning behind meta-data assigning, and resource progression
2. To make it clearer to anyone navigating the wiki - particularly editors - what stage resources were at, and what would be needed to 'finalise' resources
3. To allow for an automated check between our google docs spreadsheet, and data on the wiki, with a view to automating updates of the google spreadsheet. This was done using google's 'scraper' function.

On the Wiki we setup a number of queries of the following form, specifying the category, and information from that category to appear in the columns :{{#ask: [[Category:ToolInfo]]| ?resourcenumber| ?final| format=table | limit=200 }} Within google, a small formula can retrieve these tables, for example

=importhtml("http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/User:Bjoern/resourceoverview","table",3)

imports the 3rd table from the page http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/User:Bjoern/resourceoverview to the sheet it is inserted on in google spreadsheet. From this, we could cross-reference results and manipulate our data more freely.

PDF and Resource Pages

While PDFs live up to their name as a Portable Document Format, the provision of only PDF files by other providers, and us, was deemed problematic. We sought to provide export options - including in PDF - alongside more flexible, easily remixable and editable formats.

Discussed in part here http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/creative-commons-open-government-licensing-and-pdfs but in the case of the wiki this was further (in fact I also mention here http://www.nominettrust.org.uk/knowledge-centre/blogs/measuring-impact-tracking-open-content-wild).

Should resources be provided as:

• PDF
• .doc (or similar)
• html/wiki text (for most purposes the same thing, although cf roger frost's books)

or a combination?