Technical Update

1
Technical Update
Kathi Fletcher, Cameron Cooper, Ross
Reedstrom(and the Connexions staff)

• Objectives
• Community College Consortium
• University Press Consortium
• CNX Open for Business

2
Talk Outline

• Scalability
• Current Development Supporting Initiatives
• Future Plans

3
Scalability

• Current
• x traffic, y amount of content
• Not near limit can support x' and y'
• Future plans
• 10x increase simple optimizations, hw upgrades,
  and better caching.
• Distributed repositories when limit reached.

4
Development for Consortia
Usability!
World-wide focus
Collaborating and Branding
Find, Use, Buy
Quality Control

• Focus and Quality Control

5
Authoring Tools Import

• Expands capability and class of authors
• Word Importer (09/04)
• 1/3 to ½ of new content (increasing)
• New authors NCPEA, TWB
• Edit on the Web
• Wizard-like interface for most things
• X (Something high) use at some point
• LaTeX Import Math, Science, Engineering Profs
• Like Word is to Humanities
• Beta importance growing

6
Authoring Tools Misc.

• Usage statistics (Date??)
• Measure author or project impact
• Views by module, author
• Math and spell checkers (pipeline)
• Quality Control
• Commons upgrade (Date??)
• Can store different document types
• Upgrade path

7
Language and Translation Tools

• Connexions around the world
• Danish Connexions
• More ...
• Prepared, templates (pipeline)
• Multilingual content
• Content in 15 languages so far (screen shot)
• Browse by language (screen shot)
• Multi-language module (pipeline)

8
Community Tools Collaborating

• Collaborative workgroups (Date??) (screenshot)
• Authors collaborate to create content
• Provide simple editorial review
• Widely used 25??
• Interest groups and communities
• Beta Communities
• Description
• Discussions
• Content selections
• Browse by community TIMEA (screenshot)

9
Community Tools Branding

• cnx.org now -- was cnx.rice.edu
• More inclusive
• Supports community address
• yourcommunity.cnx.org
• Customized look
• (screen shots TWB, NCPEA)
• Endorsements (quality control)

10
Search Tools

• Search and Harvest
• OAI (Apr. 04), A9 (May 05)
• Google Good google karma (quantify) ltnot pdfsgt
• ltin the lobby vs looking at booksgt
• Connexions Search
• math search
• related content, author recommended links
• usability of cnx search (pipeline)

11
Printing Tools

• Current Book Experience
• Jones, Johnson, Do
• Result Much automated, rest identified
• New CNX standards support printing
• User semantics
• Can use for display and layout
• More flexible, sensible control for authors
• QOOP and CNX finish print capability (teamwork)

12
Future Development

• Authoring Editor like Word/Writely
• Printing Tools
• Support for segue material intro, ack
• Enhanced support for
• bibliography, index, footnotes
• numbering, book sections - chapters, sections,
  subsection
• Enhanced Quality Control and Communities 2.0
• Review Tools
• Lenses

13
CNX Open For Business

• Connexions open source release (Aug. 05)
• Development site -- rhaptos.org
• Experience
• Bremen University (screen shot?)
• Contributing to source code, especially in the
  area of math support
• Vietnam (Sept 06)
• Future Installation, tech support tools, full
  docs