Iteration 3.2 Release

Iteration 3 has been progressed to 3.2, please check out the new and improved features. Specifically in this upgrade you will find that:

In the discover app:

• Search by provider has been added to the advanced search
• Typing into the main search textfield will yield autocomplete suggestions
• Private records are no longer searchable (or displayed)

In the feed manager app:

• Feeds and their associated records are now private by default, and must be published before they can be found via the discover app.
• The dashboard has been improved, information is displayed in a tabular format.
• The implementation of the collect feed mechanism has been improved.
• The checking interval for feeds can now be modified via the edit screen.
• Feeds can now be deleted if the user owns them.
• Users are now informed (via email) when an administrator activates their account.

Please check out this documentation: XCRI Agg User Doc

Iteration 3 is now live, please feel free to check out the new and improved features. Specifically in this release you will find that:

In the discover app:

• Users are now informed of how many courses their search (via discover app) will yield prior to hitting the search, this comes with an additional colour coding

  black for 0 results
  green for 1-100 results
  orange for more than 100 results

• Advanced search functionality implemented which includes

  Refine search by Qualification (ie PHD, MSC etc) and by Attendance (part time, full time)
  Geocoding has been implemented allowing results to be sorted by proximity to the users location (closest results first)
  Additonal Filter – Qualification Level (Further Education, Community Education, Short, Undergraduate/Postgraduate Part Time etc)

• Distance (in km) from users location now shown alongside the course in the hit results.
• Search filters now display meaningful values rather than Id’s and codes.
• When user inputs their location the full address is clearly identified on the search results screen.

In the feedmanager app:

• The number of users awaiting activation by an admin are now displayed in a little red box on the Users button for administrators.
• The number of course records for a feed are now displayed in the feeds table.

Iteration 2 is now live, please feel free to check out the new and improved features. Specifically in this release you will find that:

• Feeds are now being harvested more comprehensively. This additional data is now included on each course info page.
• Search results can now be served up in a variety of formats such, namely JSON, XML (.xml, .rss, .atom) and HTML

  example:
  
  Results as HTML (default): http://coursedata.k-int.com/discover/?q=car
  Results as JSON: http://coursedata.k-int.com/discover/?q=car&format=json
  Results as XML:  http://coursedata.k-int.com/discover/?q=car&format=xml

• Searching courses now has an additional filtering mechanism, i.e you can now filter your search results by Subject and Provider.
• Searching is now more efficient and quicker.
• Findability of data has been improved.
• Administrators can force a feed to be re-collected and processed even if the underlying feed data has not changed.
  Note: This feature should be used sparingly, the most likely scenario for this functionality is if extra field/data needs to be harvested from the feed (usually when a feed handler has changed)

Iteration 1 is now live, and available for high level initial comments. Be warned that the service is being actively updated, and may not be available 100% of the time. Major features released in this iteration

FeedManager Release 1

This First Iteration The XCRI Aggregator Feed Manager is deployed at http://coursedata.k-int.com/FeedManager. The Feed manager application will be the primary interface for administrators to register their XCRI URLs. Ideally, end users will create their own accounts and register their own feeds. However, in this release, the admin user “Owns” the 13 test feeds take from http://www.xcri.org/wiki/index.php/XCRI_Feeds. Specific features new in this release

• The administrative user can register new feeds using the admin interface.
• The bootstrap application automatically adds the 13 test feeds for ease of testing in the CI service.
• Logged in users can see the output from any given feed run.
• The front page lists all registered feeds and their most recent status update.
• The process of “Collecting” a feed visits the URL and then posts the XCRI document at the aggregator workflow system.
• Feeds are automatically collected at a specified interval, or the administrator can force a given feed to update.

The next release will finalise the end user registration code (Mark is working hard on this now) so that admins can register their own feed URLs and monitor them for errors and updates, as well as set per-file perferences such as normalising the case of titles etc. We have an active “story” which will allow users to claim URLs for their own institution which are currently registered as test URLs.

Discover Release 1

This Iteration of the discover application is available at http://coursedata.k-int.com/discover. The primary objective of this release is to test the end-to-end connectivity from the FeedManager to an individual course (Assuming a “Happy Path” through the application). Any courses read from an input XCRI document will be available via this interface. Major features

• This app connects to the backend lucene cluster (ElasticSearch) indexes
• Currently, title and description are the default search fields
• The search form parameter “q” is used. This parameter can be any valid lucene syntax search currently
• Search form and results form are live, no pagination at present
• Outline COOL URI for each course is available.

Posts will follow with details for the content-type negotiation options available at these URLs, and additional backend services (Direct access to search indexes etc).