OER Hack Days / Document import-export

An idea from the CETIS UKOLN OER Hack Days

Enhance the current OpenOffice.org based document import/export tool. The tool is already in production processing OpenOffice and Microsoft Office Documents as part of OERca at Open.Michigan. Will allow existing OERca users to process a wider variety of file types for use in OER.

Currently this tool can be used as a standalone tool without any dependencies on OERca. It can extract images embedded in OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress, Writer, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint documents. There are several places where this tool can be enhanced. A few, in increasing order of ambition are listed below.


 * Confirm functionality with LibreOffice which has support for more file formats than OpenOffice.
 * Add support for the additional formats that LibreOffice supports.
 * Support all embedded file types rather than just images. Would make it a more generic tool.
 * Create a web service that provides the document processing functionality. The current tool accepts commands in JSON. Such a web service would allow any institution to provide document manipulation functionality for any application that requires it. Could use Apache Wink to wrap it.
 * Support more file formats in the web service. Perhaps use WazFormat to do the filetype detection and use existing code for LibreOffice/OpenOffice MS Office files.

Who
Ali Asad Lotia [mailto:lotia@umich.edu lotia@umich.edu] from Open.Michigan