The SDK is available here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/

There is perhaps a bigger discussion to be had around the role of next generation interfaces and how form-factor, input control, and haptic feedback have rapidly moved from the nice idea to the commercial mainstream and how this will impact on the role and function of technology in learning and teaching (as well as life more generally), but this release is a significant step forward in the development of gestural interfaces (One of the key tech developments in MIT’s tech review this year).

There have already been a number of interesting projects that have hacked the Kinect to run in windows and I’m looking forward to seeing what develops with a more robust, documented, and supported [perhaps?] SDK.

It’s already been used to control games, AR drones at dev8D, interactive video conferencing, and offer some forms of basic screen interactions (mouse-like and touch screen like).
For some examples:

It is also of note that one of the responses to this years dev challenge at Open Repositories 11 was a repository interface controlled by Kinect. [I’ll post a link, screencast if I find one].

Fedora

(in the process of writing I’ve noted that indepth coverage of most of the Fedora items can be found on the fedora Hatcheck newsletter blog: http://www.fedora-commons.org/resources/newsletter.php )

Recent/current development

• A new version of the rest api has been developed by the Fedora community
• An updated Muradora front end.
  “The Muradora project aims to develop a web front-end for Fedora repository and to re-factor Fedora authentication and authorization into pluggable middleware components.” Some of this security work is likely to become part of fedora proper
  https://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/MURADORA/Muradora
• Islandora – new drupal based front end
  http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/ISLANDORA/Islandora
• An update of the fedora GSearch service plugin ( full text indexing) http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/hatcheck/2008/02/27/fedora-gsearch-20-release-takes-advantage-of-lucene/
• Plug-ins for popular applications are under development (wikis, zotero, MSWord)

Developments (preOR09)

• improve out of box administrative gui – move towards a web-based gui
• improved api for backend storage (akubra api)
• This is linked to discussions with DSPACE, ePrints on a common storage abstraction to develop a
• Pluggable storage sub-system integration.
• Support for SWORD 1.3

Longer term developments

• Work on webdav – to lower ingest barriers by supporting drap and drop
• More enhanced content models
• Active Fedora (based on/ similar to active record in Ruby
• Hydra – working towards an out of the box Fedora to support faculty create/store object directly; longer term support for more complex arrays of digital objects. http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project

duraspace: DSpace and Fedora collaboration

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/hatcheck/2008/11/11/dspace-foundation-and-fedora-commons-receive-grant-from-the-mellon-foundation-for-duraspace/
Moving to sharable module development – the initial project will be the development of storage module. The investigation of possible durable storage service layer (broker) offering: pluggable storage, ‘Cloud’ storage, ‘interCloud’- university offered storage services

DSpace

Jim Downing presenting an update on DSpace at Dev8D but (afaik) most of what he presented either realted to the work on duraspace mentioned above or is now part of the new 1.5.2 DSpace release. The details of this release have been summarized by Stuart Lewis’s blog post http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2009/04/15/dspace-152-whats-
in-it-for-me/. A few of the new things from his highlights are:

• Support for SWORD 1.3
• “Shibboleth support has been added.”
• More refined ldap integration options
• support for uketd_dc and exposing it via OAI-PMH (out of the box)
• export tools have been improved

ePrints

ePrints is now around 10 yrs old and despite close ties to the Open Access movement, ePrints is also developing support for the gamut of institutional processes. In particular, it’s developing greater support for statistics, research management, and better desktop integration.

ePrints are planning to have beta version of ePrints 3.2 by or09 . Key updates planned for this release:

• metadata values can now be resolvable references not just literals.
• extendable data types – will support CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) out of the box.
• integration of work of IrStats project – stats and citations improvements to system.
• Support for a tiered storage layer plugin. http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2009/02/cloud-researcher-and-repository.html

Edit: a fuller list of updates in this release is available http://wiki.eprints.org/w/New_Features_Proposed_for_EPrints_3.2

Microsoft

Microsoft Research’s team working on repositories and scholarly communications have produced a number of free tools based on Microsoft products (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/tc/scholarly_communication.mspx). I’ve talked about the Creative Commons plugin before but they’ve also developed beta versions of an ejournal service, a document conversion service, an onotlogy plugin for word, a research information centre (with the British Library), they’ve worked with the ePrints to develop a windows-based version of ePrints, and a research repository.

Version 1 of the research repository is going to be formally released at workshop at OR2009 (https://or09.library.gatech.edu/workshops.php). Work on related tools for the desktop and mobile devices is planned after this launch.

The debate about free / somewhat open tools built on commercial products is a separate issue but it’s worth remembering that most insititutions are going to have and support all the required comercial software anyway – irrespective of what the repository software they consider (I’ll come back to this in another post).

Microsoft also have released some of their development tools to education. In an initiative called dreamspark users can download full versions of Microsoft development software under an academic license. Computer Science departments have had this sort of deal for a while but the two good things about this are: it’s open to any student/ academic and it’s no longer a ‘mediated’ rather it uses shibboleth and your own institutional login to verify status.

Please note the following is not based on using these applications, but on what they describe themselves as doing – trying to use these is something I’ll explore when the opportunity arises.

OfficeSWORD

This is a downloadable plugin for Office2007 to support submission via SWORD to a repository. It currently supports deposit from Word2007 and PowerPoint2007.

It still appears very much in beta and is not yet extensively tested/ documented, but the code is available as open source at Codeplex  http://www.codeplex.com/OfficeSWORD.

It will be interesting to see how this plugin develops  but even as it stands,  it is another example of the growing number of projects developing desktop deposit tools.

I’m not yet in a position to compare the  functionality of this too with other desktop deposit tools but… I can’t help thinking this particular tool has the potential to be very useful to repository managers wanting to enable desktop deposit by academics. As the project originates  from Microsoft Research, and is integrated into the desktop applications used to create many simple digital assets it could be much easier to sell to staff who aren’t interested in installing and learning yet another programme.

Research-output repository codename ‘famulus’

this is a first beta release so I’m not sure how much of the below functionality is included yet. UPDATE: savas has commented below that all of the listed functionality is in this release. He also points out what they’re working on next.

“MSR’s Research Output Repository Platform (codename “Famulus”) aims to provide the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization’s repository ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain experience for those who want to quickly set up a research output repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is based on Microsoft’s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1)  […] New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of research assets—such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags — as well as the semantic relationships between them. Support for various services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.” http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/48e60ac1-a95a-4163-a23d-28a914007743/Details.aspx .

Everything I’d heard thus far about Microsoft’s initiative in this area (of which these are only 2) had focused on scholarly articles, publishing journals, and research data. Seeing lectures on this list of supported assets is a welcome surprise that begins many more questions than it answers.

More details

More about both of these can be found on Savas’ blog and in a podcast interview by Tallis. I’ll listen to the podcast soon-ish and add anything more about lectures or other learning materials as a comment.

Tallis podcast http://blogs.talis.com/xiphos/2008/10/15/savas-parastatidis-and-alex-wade-talk-with-talis-about-microsoft-research-famulus-scholarly-communication-and-semantic-computing/ or http://tinyurl.com/528dm3

OfficeSWORD

SWORD plugin for Word2007

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/07/86c8cc56-d3e4-49d9-985f-2cfd011f6d54.aspx

SWORD plugin binary release

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/10/adabe247-f9f7-4328-9298-99fe9ef0727f.aspx

Famulus

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2008/10/08/0a59c3e1-0fb7-4c11-9dcc-89db3c8db17d.aspx