Hello Everyone

I thought I'd kick off the group with a couple of items that might be considered for inclusion in the demo portion of the workshop.

First,  I have been working with the "Feeds" module (www.drupal.org/project/feeds) to consume results from our Vivo implementation.  The Vivo site contains information about faculty at Cornell along with their areas of expertise, college affiliation, etc.  I'm using the Drupal sparql module (with a couple of small modifications) to create sparql queries into vivo.  I then wrote a "sparql importer" module which has a "fetcher" for obtaining the sparql results and a "parser" which turns the results into a drupal custom content type.  Then I used the views module to create multiple views of the faculty information.  I have also used the Drupal "services" module to expose those views as a web service.  The end result is that the drupal site becomes both a consumer and producer of faculty/expert information.  An older version of a proof of concept site (using the FeedApi/Feed Element Mapper modules...which the Feeds module supercedes) can be seen at http://cals-experts.mannlib.cornell.edu.

A couple of days ago a colleague (Jaron Porciello) came into my office and asked about my interest in helping develop an institutional respository for Sokoine University (in Morogoro, Tanzania).  Jaron thought that DSpace or Greenstone could be used but she also wants to be able to consume metadata from the repository into a new implementation for the lanteeal product (considered being done in Drupal).  Essentially, a proof-of-concept system for this could be a good example of an integration of a Drupal with a institutional repository containing locally produced content.  The main hook, in this case, would be a drupal OAI-PMH module. I found a version which works with D6 but I haven't tried working with it yet.    

The Sokoine University project is also going to have some involvement with Gracian Ghimwaza from ITOCA.