Jorum Blog

RSS for Bulk Upload into Jorum

Posted by Frank Manista on 9th December 2011

The Jorum Team have tested some RSS feeds from various OER projects, and we are again in a position to offer RSS as a means of ingesting resources. If you think that you have an RSS feed which takes into account the requirements outline below, we would be happy to test it in Jorum. Please email: support@jorum.ac.uk

Please take the following information into account:

• Only an admin user from Jorum can currently deposit an RSS feed, so you must send the feed URL to a member of the Jorum Team. The reason for this is that the code is still experimental and has some pitfalls.

• Only an RSS Version-2 feed is currently supported, i.e., the document must have the following root element with the version attribute: rss version="2.0" (surrounded by < and > on either side)

• The feed is not continually polled for new content. Normal feed readers continually poll the feed and any new items are displayed. The current functionality simply reads the feed when it is deposited and all the items are created in DSpace. It's ostensibly a snapshot in time of that particular RSS feed. If you add in the same feed again, it will simply store duplicates.

• The physical data of the resource in the feed is not stored in Jorum. A link is simply created pointing to the resource as indicated by the RSS feed (the "link" element, in other words).

• Metadata for the items in the feed will be parsed and stored within the item in Jorum, including licence information. The metadata within the feed can be expressed in Learning Object Metadata (LOM), Dublin Core (DC) or International Metadata Standards for Metadata (IMSMD) with the relevant name spaces:

http://www.imsglobal.org/question/qti_v2p0/imsqti_intgv2p0.html

http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/downloads/LOM/lomv1.0/xsd/lom.xsd http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1

• The feed should include a Creative Commons licence, such as Attribution, Non-Commerical, Share-Alike (or CC BY NC SA) if it is deposited into Jorum, including licence information. Only a link to the Creative Commons licence is required: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/. Any text surrounding the link will be ignored.

It is very important to consider the following:

• If a feed is used as a means of deposit into Jorum, the actual content does not get stored in the repository -- only a link. Features such as full-text search will not be available.

• The feed isn't continually polled for new content, and so there is no functionality for Jorum to respond automatically to deletes or updates within a feed.

• The feed MUST be valid XML. If the XML coming back isn't valid in the first place, we cannot process it, and neither can any validator, XML reader, etc.

• Items within a feed are not auto-classified within Jorum. In other words, every item in a feed is stored within a single collection as chosen by the admin user, i.e., a top-level JACS or LearnDirect classification. Having an individual feed for each classification, such as the OpenLearn model would ensure that items are classified correctly, as these feeds can be deposited separately.

For more information on using RSS for bulk-load ingest into Jorum, as well as examples of what the feed should look like, go to the RSS Guide