What do we want from a FLOSS repository?

The word “repository” tends to suggest something big and centralised, set up to deal with the needs of large institutions, or even whole education systems. Typically people imagine them being hosted on big humming boxes tended by people in white coats who have got lost from a Gary Larson cartoon. But it doesn’t have to be like that. The OpenDock project sees a repository as a thin layer which sits between your file system and the rest of the net, controling access and providing information on what is being shared. The problem with this kind of approach is that people’s personal computers are not always on the net, are sometimes behind firewalls, or (as in my case) tend to be hijacked by teenagers whose fingers are trembling with messenger withdrawal.

In order to tackle this problem, the OpenDock repository (baptised opendocument.net) will be installable on any hosted web space, so long as it runs PHP and a database. That way anyone can make their files available reliably to the rest of the world, with the bandwidth and capacity that they choose.

The repository also provides extra information about the resources which are stored. An IMS Learning Design parser will be integrated, so that when you are sharing educational resources the activities which can be carried out with them will be visible to the people who are searching. This is a module in the repository system, so it would be easy to adapt the system for any other XML data posted about the resources.

This paper describes the system which is being built, and which will soon see the light of day. Keep an eye on the Bazaar, we’ll be posting the news as soon as it is available.

2 comments June 20th, 2006