Prodfaq

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This is the FAQ for our PROD Project directory

Feel free to add any additional questions or answers you have to this page

What is PROD? PROD is an experimental directory of JISC projects - it currently aims to gather information about every project that has been funded by JISC in living memory.

Who or what is JISC? JISC stands for Joint Information Systems Committee. They are tasked with supporting use of ICT across UK higher education in various ways.

What are these projects then? One of the things JISC does is to fund institutions to do projects. The projects themselves consist of any number of exciting things like running online repositories or studying the potential uses of e-portfolios or writing software to do online assessments. The list is huge and the variety is massive. Managing them is a task and a half - and keeping track of them from an external point-of-view is pretty time-consuming.

But you're just supposed to be supporting the e-Learning Programme why are you doing every project ever? This is because it's easier to get everything and then figure out what is and isn't in the e-Learning Programme later.

'''Cool... So can I update my own information then?''' At the moment not unless you're a cetis staff member - however you CAN comment on any of the projects by logging in (either through openid or the password you've got for the rest of the cetis site - go here to register)

How did you get all that information? At the moment we screen-scrape the JISC website to get the initial names and descriptions of projects. The system then hunts through individual project websites for newsfeeds and other dynamic information which we can display as activity within PROD. We also include a number of other information sources such as odd spreadsheets and other documents which JISC kindly send our way from time to time. We will (as soon as it becomes available) use JISC's new project management system aka PIMS as an additional data source.

How often is it updated? Feeds are harvested hourly. Scraping the JISC site for new projects currently happens manually every so often. This means that new projects won't appear in PROD until they've been added to the JISC web site. Once PIMS is available and integrated with PROD, information on new projects will become available as soon as the information has been entered into PIMS.

Why is that any better than just looking at the JISC website?
 * Entries on individual projects are concise - with links to the full text if you want it
 * It gives you an at-a-glance view of activity and current state of projects (funded or not, blog activity, edits etc)
 * It pulls in and aggregates project newsfeeds
 * It has nice search and browse functionality - including easy ways to get cross-links between projects
 * You can leave comments
 * It can be used to document relevant technical standards through links to the Standards Catalogue (developed by JISC CETIS and UKOLN)

How do the projects listed on the front page get chosen At the moment this is done by selecting projects with a high level of activity. We may change this in the future. It is no-longer limited to current ones.

Can I get this information back out in some nice re-usable format? I'm glad you asked that! Yes of course - you can get information in an RDF format called DOAP and you can get the activity logs out in ATOM or RSS formats. See the PROD API documentation for details. We are experimenting with using this in widgets and to drive other services.

Are there guidelines for creating and editing PROD entries? We're still developing guidelines, but are going to collect questions and answers at FAQ and Guidelines about Prod entries