Before we go on I’ve written an FAQ on the PROD wiki which you are all advised to have a look at…

The PROD Vision:

PROD is a dynamic directory of JISC projects providing an easy-to-use way to locate projects and get a view of their current status and activity. Through integration with the Standards Catalogue and e-Framework it will also provide an overview of interoperability standards used by projects and their rationale for doing so.

PROD draws information on projects from a number of sources including the JISC website, individual project sites and project RSS feeds. We have also developed import mechanisms for legacy spreadsheets and catalogues.

The data in prod can be exported in standard formats (including RSS, ATOM, DOAP and CSV) to facilitate re-use in other catalogues.

Progress report

People oriented activities:

We are currently looking at how this data can facilitate integration with efforts at OSSwatch and with the JISC PIM system. We had a meeting in London to discuss how we can leverage doap across the different systems to exchange data and avoid duplication of effort. Present included Ross Gardler from OSSwatch with SIMAL, Yvonne Howard and Dave Millard from Southampton with their e-Framework Knowledge Base, Neil Chue Hong from OMII in Edinburgh, and Simone Spencer who is heading up the JISC PIM. It was pretty satisfying to feel we all agreed that with a bit of work on our respective DOAP implementations we would be able share core project data and thus concentrate on the more individual value-adding aspects of our projects.

Here in Bolton we are holding a workshop tomorrow on how we plan to use PROD internally to help us with the process of ”technical audits” of projects and how we can go about integrating PROD with the other JISC CETIS web offerings.

Ongoing development work:

DOAP, RSS & CSV export for collections of projects through the browse/query interface. We’re also thinking about making widgets to embed this in other places (like the main JISC CETIS site – or your own personal iGoogle or Dashboard if you like!)

OpenID associations for existing users – this is part of the general OpenID implementation across JISC CETIS sites. Currently it works to enable commenting.

Selectively elevated privileges for project staff and programme managers. This will happen automatically through existing data where available, we will also put in a “claim” button to users to assert a relationship to a project where a connection is not already held.

General review of data held, sanitisation particularly around people, organisations, themes. This will include a manual trawl for project sites, feeds etc where they haven’t been auto-discovered. Administrative interfaces may also see some improvement.

Integration with Standards Catalogue. Users (CETIS staff, projects, etc) will be able to associate projects with relevant standards and comment on the rationale for their use or implementation. The standards catalogue bit is working fine now.

Integration with main JISC CETIS sites – highlighting relevant projects within domain pages and other CETIS output (blogs, e-learning focus etc). This activity will be of particular relevance to ongoing comms work including the “technology & standards briefings”.

Highlights of completed development work to date:
(Roughly in order of implementation)

• Core data model
• Core interface
• Old directory import
• JISC spreadsheet import
• DOAP export
• Search interface
• Funding status indicators
• AJAX editing (administrators only at the moment)
• JISC web-scraper
• RSS feed-scraper
• Data-sanitisation utilities (for admins)
• Activity indicators
• Comments
• Browse & querying interface
• OpenID authentication (for commenting)

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The technical principles behind OpenID are simple enough: the user tells your application their openid URL, the app asks the relevant provider if everything is ok, the provider comes back and tells the app a whole bunch of stuff saying that the user is kosher (or halal or whatever it says in their profile).

The latest version of the toolkit made this a breeze – coming as it does with working examples and very well documented code. Most of the work was putting in a few new hooks in my authentication script to catch both ends of the transaction, copying and pasting some code from the example scripts to create the consumer object and set it flying and finally catching the response at the end and telling my application that the user is now logged in.

As with most quick work there is still quite a bit tidying up to do – particularly around how I associate existing users in the LDAP directory with their OpenIDs… At the moment I’m just not bothering. Useful error messages would probably be a good idea too! Testing it with a few different providers is also a must.

One gotcha I discovered was that at some point the exact recipe for doing Delegation must have changed and that the library is more fussy about this than other implementations I’ve seen and used. When testing using my own domain’s delegation which I’ve had set up for years it was consistently failing. This is not good news as there are probably thousands of people who still have it set up exactly as I did…

Another (Ubuntu specific) issue was that it was failing to authenticate against yahoo’s service because I was missing some bits of openssl… This was fixed with a quick sudo apt-get install openssl ca-certificates

Now I’ve had a few brushes in recent months with OpenID mainly around the web provision for the XCRI project – where we got OpenID working across WordPress, Mediawiki, and (through some rather cheap hacking) BBpress. It was however reliant on plugins for said apps and never really a very satisfactory experience – generating a long string of complaints from users getting very variable results depending on which provider they were using. Upgrading any particular component of the site seemed to just lead to more chaos.

Sadly I think that these variable experiences do rather detract from the potential that OpenID has to help us all better manage our online identities. That and the insistence of so many “providers” like Yahoo! and WordPress.com that they are just that, providers and not consumers. I’ve already got about 6 OpenIDs on the go without really realising – useful for testing but the exact opposite of the single authentication service goal. Tsk tsk.

Anyway… Now that I’ve actually tackled the problem at a slightly deeper level I’m feeling confident that over time we can not only iron out XCRI’s woes but also introduce OpenID across the JISC CETIS (and IEC) services in a reasonably robust way. The future looks rosy, the sky is blue, thunderclouds? What thunderclouds?

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