OpenScout

OpenScout Portal The OpenScout Portal allows you to access hours of free management education from one website with just a few clicks. It lets business users, teachers and students search, visualize, use, share and publish business information.

What are the main features of the OpenScout Portal?

The OpenScout portal provides users with an interface to start a keyword based search, filter search results, include competence search criteria, or add social metadata like tags, comments or ratings. Additionally, the user is presented with recommended tools for working with a selected resource.

Technical Architecture

OpenScout currently integrates several learning object repositories (LOR). Each repository offers an OAI-PMH interface to enable harvesting of the repository’s LOM instances which are represented using the OpenScout application profile. The application profile relies on the LOMv1.0 standard and is extended to enable skill- and competence-based search following the European Qualification Framework (EQF). The EQF describes skills as cognitive and practical while competences are described as the ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social or methodological abilities. Since the domain of management education cannot be described only based on functional skills, OpenScout also uses the broader concept of competences. As a starting point an initial taxonomy for Business and Management Education is used. The overall architecture of the OpenScout system is shown in the following figure.

The harvested LOM instances are stored in the central OpenScout Repository Federation. Prior harvesting is preferred over direct search for performance and reliability reasons. An OAI-PMH interface is offered to content providers in order to retrieve enriched metadata of their learning objects. The harvested LOM instances are extended with additional metadata like connections between different LOM instances that are generated within OpenScout when objects are used together in a course or when a new object is generated by re-authoring of an existing object.

Additionally, OpenScout maintains user profiles (containing information about the users, e.g. interests and competences), tool profiles (containing data about tools that can be recommended, social metadata (data added by users, e.g. tags and ratings), and usage metadata (data about the user’s actions and the usage of objects).

Since the OpenScout web portal accesses different data sources and will mix this data to create new services, it needs a backend layer that allows scalability, and an easy way to extend services with a plug-in based architecture without affecting the client layer. In order to address these issues, the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, namely the open source ESB Apache ServiceMix is used. All communication concerning the web services takes place via the ESB. Furthermore, whenever an event occurs (e.g. when a user conducts a search or opens a document), the ESB calls a web service that stores the event as CAM (Contextualized Attention Metadata) instance in the usage metadata database to enable further services, e.g. for recommending learning objects based on trust or users to collaborate with.

Functionalities provided through the demonstrator

The OpenScout demonstrator aims to provide value-added services that build on the OpenScout infrastructure. It is structured as a container of customizable widgets providing the GUI for respective services. The demonstrator provides a search functionality that supports faceted search enabling filtering of the search results, according to the properties of the retrieved learning objects, e.g. content type, competences, language, and repository. The search results are presented together with basic information derived from the LOM description of each learning object. After selecting a learning object, the user is presented with a new container that holds document specific information according to general metadata (date, author, type etc.), social metadata (ratings, comments, tags), as well as user competences and skills. Registered users can add their own ratings, tags and comments. Competences can only be changed by authorized persons, such as content providers or facilitators. Additionally, the user is presented with recommended tools for working with the selected resource. These recommendations consist of tools for visualization, authoring, and collaboration and are based on the user profile, the profile of the selected learning object and the profiles of the tools.