ALOE will be presented at CeBIT 2008 in Hannover this week! You can find us at the DFKI stand (B37) in hall 9. Rafael Schirru will be there from Monday to Wednesday, and you can meet me on Friday, where I will also give a talk about some of the ideas behind ALOE as part of the so called “future talks” in the CeBIT future parc. The talk will be in German and is called “Schöne neue Metadatenwelt - Experten, Computer und User Generated Content”. It will take place on Friday from 4.30-5.00 pm.

By the way: A CeBIT instance of ALOE with resources about the DFKI exhibits, future talks and much more can be found here. Check in!

It was a bit silent here recently - but only in the ALOE blog! Behind the scenes, a lot is happening. This especially concerns the refactoring of the system. We learned several lessons in the last months, and we got some very valuable feedback from inside and outside DFKI. So what are the changes to expect in the next ALOE version?

First of all, ALOE 2.0 will have a new JSP interface which allows URI driven navigation. The implementation is performed according to the J2EE Pattern FrontController in combination with the Action Pattern in order to make the component easy to maintain and simple to extend.

In addition to that, a new architecture of the ALOE Web Service has been implemented which provides the following advantages:

• Improved interface in particular for JAVA clients. For such clients many methods return beans so that a confusion of return parameters can be avoided.
• The business logic is encapulated in a seperate layer in order to enhance the extensibility of the system.
• Encapsulation of the data base access in dedicated classes so that the exchange of the persistance layer will be eased for future scenarios.

Further the new ALOE Web Service stores resources, user-defined metadata sets and metadata about the resources in a MySQL data base. That way fine grained access control to the data which is stored in the system can be guaranteed.

The current version of ALOE provides new functionalities on the user interface side as well as on the application programming interface side. For the user interface the support for closed groups has been implemented. Whenever a user wants to join a closed group she has to request authorization for the membership from the group administrator. Group administrators can then decide whether they grant or deny access to the group. Further resource previews have been enhanced by status bars which show the user how often a resource has been viewed and how it has been rated in average.

In order to avoid misuse of the system a user has to confirm her e-mail address which she has provided with the registration. For this purpose she receives an e-mail with a confirmation link which she has to click. Her account will then be activated subsequently.

On the application programming interface side possibilities have been provided to reference licenses which are associated with published resources via URI. For the Creative Commons licenses which are supported by the system shortcuts are provided additionally. If you plan to make use of this new functionality please consider our javadoc documentation of the Web service interface. In order to make our Web service easier to use for arbitrary clients the validation of input parameters has been improved. Optional parameters which have been omitted will be set to appropriate default values.

One of the next steps which has to be performed is the integration of the ALOE bookmarklet that has been implemented by our intern Martin Uhlir. Contributing resources to ALOE will then be even easier than today

Tomorrow (28th November at 11:30am GMT) I will give a talk in Milton Keynes where I’m currently working as a “visiting researcher” at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University UK. The talk is titled “ALOE - an Open and Social Resource and Metadata Hub.” And here’s the abstract:

In this presentation the requirements of a framework for sharing digital resources and metadata to meet the needs of open, flexible e-learning solutions will be discussed.
The changing nature of the Web and its users as observed in recent years clearly establishes the need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the potential for working with existing digital resources.
Formal metadata about the resources can be combined with information created in lightweight and user-centric approaches in order to significantly enhance resource descriptions and enable more efficient access to existing knowledge. The ALOE system, currently in development at DFKI, is one such solution and will be presented as a realization of an appropriate framework.

It seems that there won’t be any recording or webcasting, but check out this link, just in any case.

The last two weeks we spent adding (smaller) functionalities to the system and fixing some bugs that were reported by our beta testers. We also changed the encoding in our database which caused us so much trouble in the last weeks. Thanks a lot to David Haase who spent a great amount of effort and care to fix our database problem and save our data. We also integrated the new Ajax functionalities which were implemented by our intern Martin Uhlir.

The new Ajax functionalities are:

• Automatically refreshing number of unread messages on the welcome page.
• Sand glasses on the contribute pages which appear after the contribute button has been clicked.
• Check nickname availability on the registration page.

Furthermore, the following functionalities have been added:

• Stay logged in via cookie.
• Resources can now also be inserted into sets in the contribute step.
• In the lists “Highest Rated” and “Most Viewed” the according values (average rating value and number of views) are displayed.
• Different ranking options for “My resources” and “My favorites”.
• User-definded metadata sets may be deleted by their contributors.
• Users can choose among three different privacy levels for profile details (public, contacts, private).
• New display of member lists.

Wow, a small step for mankind, but a huge step for ALOE! Will this be our international breakthrough?

Ok, to be honest: It was maybe only seen by my dear colleague Stephan and me in the impressive Apple Flagship Store…but it looks great, even on an iPod touch, doesn’t it?

In the current version of ALOE the group and visibility management have been improved. Still one of three visibility levels can be assigned to a resource (public, group or private). The new feature is that any public resource can be posted to a group. This makes it on the one hand possible to share a resource with members of a certain group and on the other hand the resource is also retrievable for users of the system which are not a member of the according group.

Associating an additional metadata set to a resource in the past required the upload of a file. In ALOE V0.6 such metadata sets can also be associated by referencing a URI. Both kinds of additional metadata sets (files and bookmarks) are displayed on the detail view page of the according resource and can also be accessed from there.

Additionally smaller bugs have been fixed, e.g., the forms in the system can now be navigated easily by using the tab key.

Today we’ve finished the first testing phase of ALOE - thanks a lot to all the beta testers for their engagement and their very helpful comments and feedback!

So, what did we learn in the last days?

• The system was running very stable - we didn’t have a single system crash! Maybe the latest HP update was removing most of the trouble we had before.
• The interface seems to work very fine for firefox, internet explorer, and safari. At least nobody complained
• Encoding ist still causing some trouble. We tried to do as much as possible with Unicode, but sometimes you don’t care…and suddenly notice that the DB on your server is running with ISO-8859-1. Bah…there’s some stuff left to do!
• We need some additional explanations on the pages as well as an FAQ page in the system to which we can refer. E.g., some of our testers complained they didn’t understand the meaning of certain metadata fields.
• The use of an external web page thumbnailer is not a real good solution. Especially when the service you use does no longer deliver any thumbnails We’re now developing our own thumbnailer…
• The group and visibility management will be changed. First of all, every user will have the possibility to share public resources to groups (when he or she is member of the group). And as the owner of a resource, you can chose to restrict the visibility of the resource (as “private” or “for certain groups only”).
• The privacy settings in the user profiles should of course include that you can’t be found in a “member search” when somebody looks for data you’ve decided to hide - sorry for that!

The ALOE team will have some stuff to do in the following weeks!

We’re already online for several weeks now, but there was still a lot of work left that we wanted to finish before we today announced the first (more or less private) beta version of ALOE. In the future, we will tell you some more about our ideas, about where we want to go, how ALOE developed, the people involved, news, bugs, what so ever… Stay tuned!