Sakai And The Academic Enterprise

Sakai and the Academic Enterprise Oracle’s Perspective

Michael Feldstein, Principal Product Manager, OracleEric Chan, Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle

July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A.

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

The Problem Space

July 2009 10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A. 3

What is the Academic Enterprise?

Source of TruthSource of Truth

• SIS• Data Hub• Identity Management• Etc.


Academic Nerve CenterAcademic Nerve Center

• Business Intelligence• Data Warehouse• CRM• Etc.


Online LearningEnvironment


• LMS• Wikis• Blogs


• Google Docs• Flickr• Etc.


What Else?

Source of TruthSource of Truth



Academic Nerve CenterAcademic Nerve Center









Email

ChatCalenda

r

Web-conference

Networked Drives

Sakai 2: The Challenge In Microcosm

• Applications are silos• Sites are silos• The existence of 23 discussion forums

doesn’t help you build the 24th • Similar apps can’t share the same data• Transport support is labor-intensive• Federation is hard

July 2009 610th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A.

Sakai 3 Gets You Partway There

• No more site silos• Reduced application silos• A REST erector set for building capabilities

(e.g., discussions)

But Wouldn’t It Be Great If…• Your presence indicator knew you were in class in Room 301• A teacher could add an assignment from her desktop calendar• The student would get that assignment added to his PIM task

list• Activities (including archives) taking place in external apps like

DimDim or Google Wave would be surfaced in the course site• Course sites from a partner school could be surfaced in your

Sakai instance• Students and teachers could aggregate course content from

several universities in a rich desktop client (PLE)• You could save not only the end product but all the related

collaborative artifacts of student work to an ePortfolio• Somebody else did some of the programming work of all of this

for you

A New Standard: ICOM



Integrated Collaboration Object Model

Collaborative access to global networked knowledge • assists humans, organisations, and systems • with individual, collective learning and problem

solving • by encompassing multidisciplinary contributions• enabling increased innovation and knowledge

production on individual, organisational, and global levels.

Inspired by Doug Engelbart’s original 1962 report of: AUGMENTING

HUMAN INTELLECT: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK


Social Network Implicit Relations

Explicit Relations

Network of Collaboration EntitiesEntity Class Hierarchy


Current State of Fragmented Collaboration Applications

Productivity eroded by• incompatible collaboration tools• technology driven tools require constant context switching to perform a

single task• incomplete threads of conversations when users communicate through

multiple channels• unable to relate, aggregate, and reason about diverse types of

collaboration artifacts by project, task, or metadata• lack of uniform relevance rankings of search results from isolated

repositories• soaring costs or technical barriers for integrating silos of repositories• weakening governance amid proliferation of web 2.0 content silos


Why Integrated Model?

An integrated collaboration model is essential for• (users) role-aware and task-driven collaboration

• seamless transitions among the diverse collaboration activities• (developers) application development platform

• custom composite applications, • contextual collaboration in enterprise business applications, • enterprise workplace portals,• new modes of collaboration

• (integrators) application integration architecture• interoperable standard modules• canonical data and message model • model-driven development and integration


Benefits of Integrated ModelCommon policy enforcement of heterogeneous contents coupled with an

extended common infrastructure• identity management• access control• governance and record management• business rules and processes• business intelligence• task/project oriented organization of disparate types of contents• conversation threads through multi-channel, multi-modal

communication artifacts• classification, tagging, meta-data associations, activity streams• faceted search and relational navigation• search and relevance ranking• subscriptions and notifications


OASIS ICOM Technical Committee Charter• Charter

• http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/icom/charter.php

• Objective• Define the classes, attributes, relationships, and behavior of objects for a broad range of

collaboration activities around shared workspace, communication, content, coordination, and social networking

• Scope• Specify the normative standards for collaboration objects and operations in UML 2 and RDF/OWL

representations• Define the non-normative guidelines (architectures and use-case scenarios) for a new workspace

centric protocol to support a broad range of collaboration activities

• Current organizational members• Oracle Corporation• Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)• Cisco Systems, Inc.• KnowledgeTree, Inc.• ESoCE-NET

OASIS is acronym for Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards


Include a Broad Range of Collaboration Activities

ICOM is extensible and includes diverse classes of objects:• teamwork (shared workspaces, discussion forums, real-time conferences,

presence, etc.);• communication (e-mail, instant message, telephony, RSS, etc.);• content (text and multi-media contents, contextual connections,

taxonomies, folksonomies, tags, saved searches, etc.); • coordination (address books, calendars, tasks, journals, etc.); and• social networking (articulated social networks among users, communities,

groups, activities, wiki pages, blogs, recommendations, social bookmarking, etc.)

Virtually all ICOM objects are entities which are assigned universal resource identifiers


Shared Source ICOM Prototype Framework

ICOM JPA Framework for Concurrent Engineering to provide

•POJO classes•byte code Injection into POJO methods•attribute change tracking•distributed transactions•JPQL parser

Custom Factory Providers for

•DAO factory•JPQL parse tree visitor factory

Integrated Model enables Federation


Federation of LMS

ICOM POJO

Cambridge University

LMS Provider

UC Davis LMS Provider

Georgia Tech LMS Provider

Joe’s Personal Learning/Research Environment

Online Learning/Research Environment

Jane’s Personal Learning/Research Environment


ICOM’s Workspace Centric Design Pattern

• Workspace is a durable context and place to collaborate.• examples of contexts are projects, libraries, personal learning environments, personal

information management, e-Portfolios, asynchronous meetings• Workspace involves participants with different membership roles.

• participants can observe the presence of other participants in the workspace.• Workspace contains one or more

• message and document folders • address books• calendars, task lists • web conferences, chat rooms• wiki pages, forums, etc.

• Workspace is an integration hub for multi-vendor • collaboration services • content repositories• metadata facilities• infrastructure


ICOM Intersects Enterprise Business Objects in Application Integration Architecture

Joining structured business processes and unstructured collaboration activities


ICOM Synopsis

Integrated collaboration object model offers:• a standard contiguous model for seamless transitions among

collaboration activities• interoperability among modular services• unified user experience by consolidated applications in dynamic user

interface frameworks• common security, governance, and record management• extended common infrastructure simplifies business/IT administration,

provisioning, and management• (subsequent TC’s to define) bindings to multiple programming languages

and protocols• programming language bindings (RDF/OWL, Java, C#, Ajax, Python, …)• protocol bindings (SPARQL, REST/SOAP, Web Service, …)


Join the Effort!

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/icom/

A Modest Proposal


Consider ICOM for Sakai 3• For Now: Adopt/adapt the REST API

• You have to develop one anyway• You get a major head start on design and documentation• Provides the possibility of full ICOM adoption in the future• Oracle can provide advice

• After 2010: Evaluate adoption of the object model• An open source reference implementation should be

available• DAOs for integration with other platforms should be

available• Migration should be relatively straightforward

Questions?



Communication Workspace (SIOC DERI et al proposal for ICOM)


Community of Actors and Workspaces(Oracle Beehive’s proposal for ICOM)


Object Model of Workspace (Oracle Beehive’s proposal for ICOM)


Community of Spaces


Space of Multiple Conversations


ICOM Folders


ICOM Artifacts


Entity and Metadata

Document


Calendar


Task List


Conference


Education

Sakai And The Academic Enterprise