Hello Andrea, Regarding the project idea - Improving Submission User Experience, as mentioned in the GSoC ideas page, it would be good to concentrate on cleaning up submission process, especially at UI level, and providing a more user friendly submitter experience.
This would keep the project well-scoped for a GSoC summer. These requirements may be met easily using standard UI frameworks like Ext JS. Also, this can be done for XMLUI as well because the XSL stylesheet defines the presentation and can be written to support Ext JS at client side after XSLT. However, as asked by you about the problems faced by end-users, I feel that modern technology like Semantic Web, Metadata, etc together with technical abstractions like Community, Collection, etc from DSpace technology are too much visible to the end-user now at the UI level. This makes it less comfortable for the end-user to interact with DSpace instance. I agree that these abstractions are quite required for using DSpace instance effectively, but a proposed solution would be to use a layer of abstraction at the UI level to make the Digital Content Management more user friendly thereby also separating DSpace specific and Semantic Web specific things from the end-user. The new layer of abstraction shall allow changes to UI level to be immune to changes in business logic layer. Moreover the layer can help in adding AJAX based UI for DSpace. In more concrete terms, my idea is of wrapping up the current UI into a Facade and using Bridge design pattern to create another layer of abstraction above it separating the concerns effectively. The components in this new layer can be designed to be loose coupled form DSpace implementation specifics and more coupled to user-friendly interface. Although for the GSoC idea in scope now, the layer proposed by me would contain the new Submission UI component which would be built to be more user-friendly, this may be extended to include the Metadata Validator and Forms Configuration components with corresponding facade abstracting away the current tight coupling between them at logic layer currently. This would support the project of Web based UI for configuring forms. I would like to have your suggestions regarding the idea for including in my application for GSoC. Regards, On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Andrea Schweer <schw...@waikato.ac.nz>wrote: > Hello, > > it's good to see that you're interested in this project. As you may have > seen, I indicated that I'd be happy to co-mentor the project. > > On 05/04/11 16:13, Vibhaj Rajan wrote: > > In addition, I would like to know whether the project shall be > > targeted to making changes to the UI level only, or whether well > > planned modifications to underlying logic, without interfering with > > the workflow process but only to improve the UI will be allowed ? > > I assume that modifications to the underlying logic will also be > acceptable, as long as there is a good reason for the change. I expect > that this is something that would be worked out between the student, the > mentor(s) and the DSpace committers during the project. > > > I would be happy to get suggestions regarding this project idea. > > What I would really like to see in proposals for this project are > answers to the following questions: Where do you see the biggest > problems at the moment? How do these problems impact the experience of a > submitter? Do you have concrete suggestions for improvements? > > You may also have seen my comment on > https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/GSOC/DSpace+Summer+of+Code+Ideas > about making the submission process configurable via the web interface. > At the moment, the submission forms are defined using a couple of XML > files (see > https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSDOC/Submission+User+Interface if > you haven't found that page already). Only someone with shell access to > the DSpace server can change these files, and changes to the files > typically require DSpace to be restarted. Consequently, the people who > know best what metadata fields etc should be populated during submission > can't actually customise the submission process at all. The EasyDeposit > ( > http://blog.stuartlewis.com/2010/02/03/easydeposit-sword-deposit-tool-creator/ > ) > administrator interface is a good example for a more user-friendly > variant, I think. > > cheers, > Andrea > > -- > Andrea Schweer > IRR Technical Specialist, ITS Information Systems > The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Xperia(TM) PLAY > It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming > smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. > And it wants your games. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev > _______________________________________________ > Dspace-devel mailing list > Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel > -- *Vibhaj Rajan **Junior Undergraduate Department of Computer Engineering** IT BHU Varanasi +91 92 3531 2784*
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev
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