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Abstract - Alain Kavenoky

Alain Kavenoky

UNIT

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"A network of interconnected portals for sharing open contents"

UNIT is the French Science and Technology Digital University; the members of UNIT are about sixty universities and engineering schools. UNIT aims at developing and sharing digital courses for every domain in engineering. When UNIT was launched, the question of how to organize all the developed contents was raised. Two options have been available: build a large central portal or disseminate the contents as close to the authors as possible. UNIT has chosen to create a network of connected portals, based on the OAI-PMH protocols. A new open-source software named ORI-OAI has been developed, mainly based on open-source components.

The main functions are:

  • Managing all kinds of digital documents elaborated by universities, engineering schools and research organizations,
  • Sharing these documents with peer organizations,
  • Providing standardized meta-data,
  • Organizing an access policy, in the case where all the documents are not freely accessible The ORI-OAI software is an assembly of eight modules, mainly open-source:
  • ORI-OAI-workflow : management of the meta data production workflow (osworkflow)
  • ORI-OAI-md-editor : meta data editor (orbeon)
  • ORI-OAI-indexing: for meta data and full text indexing (LIUS-Lucene)
  • ORI-OAI-vocabulary: limited vocabularies, specialized for each use are proposed, this module manages theses vocabularies.
  • ORI-OAI-search : module devoted to propose search forms for local or remote contents (LUCENE)
  • ORI-OAI-repository : it exposes meta data using the OAI-PMH protocol (OCLC OAICAT)
  • ORI-OAI-harvester : harvesting a set of OAI repositories (OCLC harvester)
  • ORI-OAI-nuxeo : is the enterprise content manager used by ORI-OAI (NUXEO DM)

All these modules are developed using JAVA framework and, the full system is managed under the GPL licence.

ORI-OAI 1.5 has been released, last July. Five digital universities (sciences, engineering, life sciences, law and management), more than 30 universities and engineering schools are using ORI-OAI. Moreover, the software in used in Canada, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. It is used for managing digital courses, institutional repositories.

New versions are under development with two main objectives:

  • Connexion to the national repository of digital thesis, using TEF meta data and connexion to the STAR repository
  • Connexion HAL, the national open archive repository.




Supporting organization:
French Ministry For Higher Education And ResearchMax Planck SocietyINRIA - French national institute for research in computer science and controlUniversité Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne