Tuesday 16 December 2008

DIVAS Meeting Update

Chris has provided a list of the following for drop-down lists:
  • Professional and Statuatory Regulatory Bodies = 13 types
  • Awards = 58 types

DIVAS Meeting Update

Present: Ben, Sam, Shaun, Chris & Sue.

We discussed what we will be recording in the metadata file when uploading validation documents to HIVE. In addition, we discussed the 'submission form' and some the process involved in uploading and searching for documents in HIVE.

This is what we decided:

Subject (XCRI = Subject)
  • Discussed use of JACs
  • Decided not to use this field/element at the moment

Level (XCRI = Level)
  • Chris to provide a definitive list of levels for Drop-down / Look-up List
  • Multiple instances recorded

Validation Date (XCRI = @generated)
  • Date to be recorded = date of validation panel

Face-2-Face (XCRI = AttendenceMode)
  • Drop-down / Look-up List:

    1. Face-2-Face
    2. Distance
    3. Blended

Site of Delivery (XCRI = Venue)

  • Multiple instances recorded

Form of Assessment (XCRI = AssessmentStrategy)
  • Discuss it’s relevance for validation
  • Could be useful for recording data for disability
  • Decided not to use this field/element at the moment

Mode of Delivery (XCRI = StudyMode)
  • Drop-down / Look-up List:
  1. Full Time
  2. Part Time
  3. Fast Track 2 Year
  • Multiple instances recorded

Faculty/School (XCRI = TBC)
  • Need to investigate this further – where to record in XCRI
  • Drop-down / Look-up List:
  1. Faculty of Arts, Media and Design (AMD)
  2. Business School
  3. Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Technology (FCET)
  4. Law School
  5. Faculty of Health
  6. Faculty of Science
  7. Academic Development Institute (ADI)

Award Title (XCRI = Title)
  • Record a String title unique to the document being uploaded
  • Multiple instances recorded

Professional Body / Association (XCRI = AccreditedBy)
  • Chris to provide a definitive list of levels for Drop-down / Look-up List

Recording Document Types

Possibly recorded in XCRI Description – unique to the individual documents being uploaded

Pre-Validation Document Types
1. Validation Support Descriptor
2. Rational
3. Programme Specification
4. Module Descriptor
5. Handbooks

a. Award / Student
b. Module
c. Placement
d. Mentor
e. *Sue to speak to R. Bennifer about other types for Work Based Learning

6. Resources

Post-Validation Document Tyes
7. Validation Report
8. Validation Report Response

The Validation Collection

  • The documents are recorded as a collection in a ‘Catalogue’ folder in HIVE
  • Currently the title of the collection / ‘Catalogue’ is largely heuristic (made up) by QIS – as evidenced in the shared QIS drive

Friday 12 December 2008

Big Push Meeting

Have arranged a meeting between Sam & Shaun (technical / coding), myself and Chris (QI). We aim to thrash out the finer points of uploading documents to HIVE.

The main areas of interest are:
  • Determining which parts of XCRI-CAP we are going to use / focus on
  • How the validation documents are 'arranged' within HIVE - i.e use of collections & metadata & type of data to be recorded (doc type etc..)
  • Discuss the technology required to upload documents with the metadata
  • Exploring the search facility
Essentially, we are aiming to get documents into HIVE, be able to search for them (in context of the validation collection) and then presen them to the user.

Thursday 4 December 2008

DIVAS Meeting

Had a DIVAS meeting today - all productive. I was asked to supply a short paragraph / statement about my side of the project - so here it is (I will try and strip out as much of the teccy stuff as I can):

We had some problems matching the required document attributes with the element/fields of specific metadata schemas - such as Dublin Core and LOM. In essence, the DIVAS project needs to record some specific details - against which users could search for these documents. for example:
  • Subject
  • Level
  • Form of Assessment
  • Prof Associated Body etc....
Rather than finding a quick fix / imperfect workaround with the schemas that HIVE already uses - it was agreed that XCRI-CAP is a schema that matches very closely to what we were trying to record (see image).

Currently we are working on the HIVE repository being able to mark up documents stored in it against the XCRI-CAP metadata schema.

Essentially, HIVE requires an SDI file (XML file) to be written that tells HIVE how to generate a GUI (Graphical User Interface) - this user interface is a graphical representation of the metadata schema tree - providing the user with the field elements that make up the metadata tree and (associated with each element) the type of data you can record (see image - Dublin Core Example).

Sam has transformed the XCRI-CAP schema document (XSD file) into an SDI file by creating an XML instance of the XSD using XMLSpy. This has created a valid and fairly usable GUI in HIVE but the ouput XML file has a few errors - therefore some work needs to be done on correcting this.

Work continues and as long as we can generate a vliad output (XML output) that is valid for XCRI-CAP then it looks good to start uploading documents to HIVE.