We are the “others”

Our  passion and genuine care on open metadata and software development has lead us to contribute to on going, non-commercial projects.

Visit the projects we donate our spare time and resources, hoping to either make useful contributions ourselves, or help those who can by just stating the perceived needs of ours and of our clients, coupled  -where appropriate- with financial contributions. 

Egeria – Open Metadata and Governance

• https://egeria.odpi.org/

Every week we hear of new tools, data platforms and opportunities for organizations to embrace advanced digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. Yet despite investment and the focus of smart people, few organizations succeed in making wide and systematic use of their data.

Today’s IT is at the heart of the problem. Many tools and data platforms recognize the value of metadata, but manage it in a siloed, proprietary way that assumes they are the only technology employed by the organization. The result is that knowledge is not shared between people that use different tool sets.

ODPi Egeria is an open source project dedicated to making metadata open and automatically exchanged between tools and platforms, no matter which vendor they come from.

We believe in the open metadata and governance manifesto:

• The maintenance of metadata must be automated to scale to the sheer volumes and variety of data involved in modern business.  Similarly the use of metadata should be used to drive the governance of data and create a business friendly logical interface to the data landscape.
• The availability of metadata management must become ubiquitous in cloud platforms and large data platforms, such as Apache Hadoop so that the processing engines on these platforms can rely on its availability and build capability around it.
• Metadata access must become open and remotely accessible so that tools from different vendors can work with metadata located on different platforms. This implies unique identifiers for metadata elements, some level of standardization in the types and formats for metadata and standard interfaces for manipulating metadata.
• Wherever possible, discovery and maintenance of metadata has to be an integral part of all tools that access, change and move information.

We also believe that code talks. Egeria provides an Apache 2.0 licensed platform to support vendors that sign up to the open metadata and governance manifesto.

Figure 1 shows Egeria in action. Today’s organizations have their tools and technologies distributed across multiple data centres and cloud providers. These are shown as the green clouds. The Egeria Open Metadata and Governance (OMAG) Server Platform (blue rounded box) is deployed in each location. Each platform is then configured to run different types of integration services that are tailored to support specific types of tools (see orange circles). The Egeria services also manage the exchange of metadata between the platforms.

The Egeria open metadata and governance technology provides an open metadata type system, frameworks, connectors, APIs, event payloads and interchange protocols to enable tools, engines and platforms to exchange metadata in order to get the best value from data and tools for a wide range of use cases.

Neo4j – Online Community & Meet-up

Oxford Metadata is active in the Neo4j in addressing the need for the visualisation of deltas in Graph Databases and Neo4j in particular. Visualising meta-visualisation is still a challenge, with concepts that we can, for the moment, only see with the eyes of our minds. 

• https://www.meetup.com/Neo4j-Online-Meetup/

WordPress Metadata Pods Framework

Utilising WordPress’s own metadata infrastructure to create custom entities that offer unprecedented levels of flexibility, minimising costs.

• https://docs.pods.io

The Pods Framework is an open-source, GPLv2+ licensed PHP project released on October 8th, 2008 by Matt Gibbs. Within weeks, Scott Kingsley Clark joined the project and took over as lead developer mid-2011. The goal was to create an interface and PHP codebase to easily create, extend, and manage content types within WordPress. While the normal WordPress content architecture is limited to the built-in tables, a primary feature of Pods allows you to base content types off of their own custom tables designed around each content types’ needs.

What exactly is the Pods Framework?

The Pods Framework allows an ordinary user or developer to easily create and extend custom post types, content types, taxonomies, users, media, or comments — helping you keep your content organized and speed up the development of your project.

Pods starts as a blank slate, as most frameworks do. The control is put into the hands of the developer to mould it into what is needed, without the fluff. Much of Pods’ functionality is coupled with a UI for easy administration, however, there are large portions of the codebase that can be optionally used for advanced implementations or specific project needs. You control everything while Pods Framework does the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting.

Contributions in the Recent Past:

Neo4j – Online Community & Meet-up

Oxford Metadata had been active during the standardisation of the xAPI attend the weekly meetings of the working group. Our participation had the tangible impact of the creation of a Verb dictionary in order to standardise experience registration and enhance interoperability between experience data providers.

• https://adlnet.gov/projects/xapi/

Experience API (xAPI) Standard

xAPI is a data and interface standard that lets software applications capture and share (big) data on human performance, along with associated context information (i.e., “experience” data). Combined with learning analytics, xAPI promises to revolutionize the way education and training are conducted, managed, and measured. xAPI can be incorporated into nearly any (new or existing) learning technology, and it is agnostic about the type of learning content being delivered. xAPI is open-source and licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0.

Overview

“xAPI” stands for Experience Application Programming Interface. The ‘x’ stands for experience, because xAPI enables detailed recording and transfer of “learning experience” data, whether those data come from an e-learning experience, a simulation-based training experience, a tablet-based educational experience, or even an operational (on-the-job) experience.

In software, an Application Programming Interface (API) allows two or more applications to exchange data with (or “talk to”) one another. In the context of education and training technologies, APIs can be used to share data about learners and learning activities. Hence, xAPI is a particular standard designed to enable the interoperable exchange of data about learners’ behaviors and performance. In other words, it encodes someone’s performance using a standard format, and it follows standardized transportation rules to move those data to a data store or between applications.

xAPI can be implemented in any digital environment, including mobile learning, simulations, virtual worlds, serious games, real-world activities, mobile and wearable devices, experiential learning, and more. It can be used to track and store data on any imaginable activity, such as:

• Reading an article or interacting with an eBook
• Watching a training video, stopping and starting it
• Training progress data from a simulation
• Performance in a mobile app
• Chatting with a mentor
• Physiological measures, such as heart-rate data
• Micro-interactions with e-learning content
• Team performance in a multi-player serious game
• Quiz scores and answer history by question
• Real-world performance in an operational context

The xAPI standard also includes guidelines for xAPI’s use (e.g., “xAPI Profiles”) as well as nested specifications for xAPI-formatted data storage, authentication, and access (i.e., Learning Record Stores).