OUseful Information
Welcome to the OUseful Information protosite. This site, and the associated web services and RSS feeds, is being developed as a testbed for the application of web technologies in a Higher Education setting.
For regular updates, check out my blogs: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blog and http://micro-info.blogspot.com/. There is also related information on http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/microinfo/.
Other Possibly OUseful Things Under Development
At the current time, the protosite is host to:
- Short cuts:
- e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/t396 where t396 could be any valid course code (such as T396 (or t396 - case does not matter)) OR qualification code (e.g. D21); takes you straight to the OU Courses and Qualifications pages for that course or qualification
- e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/books/t171 where t171 could be any valid course code; returns a list of course books that must be privately purchased for the particular course (cannot be guaranteed to be corect (!))
- e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/keyword/net where net could be any keyword; return a list of courses with that word in the course title (cannot be guaranteed to be corect (!))
- e.g. http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/kn/mobile where mobile could be any keyword; search the IET knowledge network
- A course search tool - identify course codes, course titles
from any combination of the following:
- a search on the course code or part of the course code;
- a search on the course level;
- a search on a keyword or keyphrase appearing in either the course title, or the course books, or both;
- a search for residential courses.
- A course books search tool - this tool augments the course search tool by listing course books associated with a particular course (that is, books that are not provided with course materials and which must be purchased separately). Identified books are then linked directly to online booksellers.
- ROUTEScraper - the Open University Library ROUTES service maintains a database of course team approved resources for most OU courses. ROUTEScraper is a screenscraper that extracts resource information from the otherwise cluttered ROUTES search results display.
- A course search web service.
A major aim of the protosite is to explore the appropriateness and/or usefulness of different ways of making the information returned from searches free (or open) and reusable. Note that we are not necessarily using the word free in an economic sense. Rather, we are more concerned with making it freely available for reuse by separating the content from any superfluous information concerned solely with presentation.
To this end, our aim is to make calls to searches, and the corresponding results returned from searches, readily available to users. This is supported in the following ways:
- an exploration of the use of Javascript to embed results in a user's own web page;
- an exploration of the use of RSS feeds to provide search results;
- an exploration of the use of web-services to open search interfaces and provide open results.
At the current time, output formats for the various services on the protosite have been implemented as follows:
| Application | HTML | Javascript | RSS | Web service (XML/SOAP) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Course search | Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
| Course books | Y |
N |
Y |
Y |
| ROUTEScraper | Y |
Y |
Y |
N |
Development Areas
A word of warning: at the current time, the applications are not all defensively programmed. Checks should be made to ensure a valid search string before making the search....
Other stuff - like some early thoughts on reusing ROUTEs info, and some demonstrators of course related WAP (mobile phone) service can be found at http://robofesta.open.ac.uk/microinfo
This site is in no way endorsed by the Open University. Whilst much of the information on this protosite is taken from public Open University sources, we cannot guarantee that the information provided via this protosite is correct.