ePortfolio with FOAF and Atom -- proof of concept

In Creating e-Portfolios using Atom and FOAF, Scott Wilson writes:

"An e-Portfolio is, by definition, an aggregate or composite of many facets. We can look at this quite literally as an e-portfolio being aggregated from multiple feeds, each of which supplies items about a particular aspect of the subject."

and goes on to say "I'm interested in finding out WHY something more complex [than FOAF and Atom] would be necessary."

Stephen Downes in E-learing 2.0 suggests something similar:

"... Rather than being composed, organized and packaged, e-learning content is syndicated, much like a blog post or podcast. It is aggregated by students, using their own personal RSS reader or some similar application. From there, it is remixed and repurposed with the student's own individual application in mind, the finished product being fed forward to become fodder for some other student's reading and use.

"More formally, instead of using enterprise learning-management systems, educational institutions [might] expect to use an interlocking set of open-source applications...."

We decided to take up Scott's challenge. It seemed that the FOAF and Atom specifications could represent the person and their artifacts, but we wanted a example instance, an implementation, to critique.

Using Macromedia Flex, a development environment for Flash applications, Jack Waknitz created a portfolio for me. We started wiith my ELGG FOAF profile and some feeds from my Flickr site.  Jack added "Document" references to the FOAF that point to the Flickr, while I pushed around organized images into feeds using Flickr tags. The whole enterprise took under 2 work days.

Jack's application in Flash opens and renders the FOAF file, and then opens the referenced Flickr feeds and renders them under separate tabs. Other applications might be developed to do this same work (Flex was handy for us), including, we conjecture, an XSL Transform. We are fairly certain that the processing of the chained files is too much for CSS.

My portfolio is here (the system now gets the FOAF file from the URL (thanks Jack)  [It seems a little buggy loading the images in Mac Firefox and Safari.]

The FOAF it reads is here:  http://flex.ctlt.wsu.edu/flex/Portfolio/foaf.xml
The Atom comes from my Flickr  tags "timberframe" and "raisingprocess."

***Postscript

On further thought, we explored adding a reference to an XSL transform to the FOAF file above. Now, when you browse it, your browser sees reference to the XSL and you see an HTML formatted page, rather than the raw XML. (View source to see the file contents).

SO, might one do away with Flex in the story above; imbed XSL transforms in the FOAF and the Atom and just let the browser do the work? One issue is that you could not just use Atom from 3rd parties, you'd need a process like Feedburner to manipulate the Atom (much as they make podcasts by finding <a href pointers to .mp3 files

end postscript***

Conclusions

• Scott's conjecture that FOAF and Atom are sufficient for making an ePortfolio seems well founded.
• If authorization for viewing the portfolio is required, it could be added by placing the Flex application on a secure web page.
• If authorization for the feeds is required, that will require additional analysis.
• Some Atom sources, e.g., Flickr, add some extraneous branding text to the feed, which might not be desired in the portfolio, feed sources should, as a rule, let the end user have maximum control over the feed content.
• Portfolio creators might want multiple FOAF files, for different purposes; a FOAF editor application that goes beyond FOAF-a-matic would be handy.
• Our application assumes the FOAF points to RSS documents. This assumption would need to be generalized, the user might want to include documents of several types, including single files (.doc, .PDF)
• Because a user might want to re-mix content that is individually available in several feeds, as RSS editor application might be desirable as another auxiliary tool. A blog or del.icio.us might serve as a remix tool/RSS editor.