This is a list of potential tools or improvements / upgrades / tweaks to SAKAI that would be very useful. This is in the context of UK HE/FE, but attempting not to be too specific.
1. New Tools
- Tools for content that doesn't fit the traditional portal style of access. There are types of content in particular: streaming content (audio, video, system monitoring, data flows from experimental apparatus, etc) and that with an alternative distribution mechanism (bittorrents, mirrored websites, etc).
- Tools for disconnected use. There are inevitable times when people want to use a system and they don't have a network connection (or don't have a fast enough network connection). Email, blog and calendar functionality in particular are likely candidates.
- Tools to overcome the fact that many third party tools assume that URLs work in a way that they don't work in SAKAI (and indeed most portals). Candidate tools include searching, bookmarking, recommendation, natural language translation and standards validation sites.
- Tools for tracking and monitoring useage of the portal. Traditional web statistical tools are broken for portals because of the way they use urls and caching/refreshing issues. They are likely to stay broken, even if each portlet for each user has a unique user. The JISC monitoring unit, for example, have standards which will completely misrepresent portal usage stats.
2. Upgrades to existing tools
- Documentation: a number of the SAKAI tools could benefit from improved documentation
- Default content: most of the SAKAI tools could benefit from default content. Default content shows how a tool might be used and over comes problems is where to start in an empty install:
- Wiki: wiki pages on how to use the wiki, wiki formatting, etc.
- Resources: SAKAI and associated manuals and technical documentation
- Announcements: SAKAI release notes and announcements
- Resource Searcher: sample searches that will get hits in the other default content
Alternative marketing "themes" for the default install. A little like http://www.csszengarden.com/. Perhaps the crafting of a new look and feel could be set as part of a CSS / Web course at some institution?
- Accessibility / standards compliance work: accessibility and standards compliance is a pre-condition of JISC funding, any demo or trial portals need to be conformant or show a good-faith attempt
- Internationalisation and localisation enabling tools.
- Enhanced support for metadata collection and use within the portal. Currently the quality of the metadata in the demonstrator is of very low quality. There are several ways of improving it:
- Collecting better metadata at the point of data creation/upload
- Better differentiation between uploader and creator
- Better default metadata (including remembering whether individuals or their institutions own copyright on their material?)
- Better ways of presenting the metadata to the user for entry / checking / validation
Using default licences. The JISC has blessed the OSI open source licences (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=about_opensourcepolicy) and appears to be in the process of blessing the Creative Commons licences (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=cie_creativecommons). Using these would be excellent.
- Better display of metadata at content use time.
- Better explaination of who created this content, who owns the copyright, what licence it is under and what the implications of this licence are (this is greatly enabled by having default licences such as the OSI and CC ones)
- Better processes for correcting metadata that seems wrong or out of date
- Infer metadata about the content from examination of the content itself.
- Language identification
- File type identification (based on content rather than file name)
- extracting text binary documents
- extracting keywords from textual documents.
- making links between documents based on their content
- Collecting better metadata at the point of data creation/upload
