Transcript Poster [PowerPoint]

RDN-Include:
Re-branding Remote Resources
Subject Gateways in the UK
The UK Higher Education community has funded a range of
subject gateway, now part of the RDN (Resource Discovery
Network) which provide access to quality, manually
catalogued Web resources.
www.sosig.ac.uk
SOSIG Home Page
www.omni.ac.uk
Searching using OMNI
The subject gateways cover a range of subject areas, such
as social sciences (SOSIG) and medicine (OMNI).
The Institutional Perspective
Although institutions are appreciative
of the services, some feel that:
• They have a need to complement
the subject gateways with
resources catalogued locally,
to reflect local needs
• There may be local pressures to
An institutional gateway
be active in this area
• The branding of interfaces is
important
The Solution: RDN-Include
RDN-Include
The need to address institutions’ concerns over branding has
led to the development of the RDN-Include software suite
which allows institutions to provide user access to the RDN
subject gateways without the user leaving the institution’s
Web site.
Here we see how a fictitious
University provides access to RDN
gateways while maintaining its own
look-and-feel.
The results of a search appear to
be provided by the institution.
CGI and JavaScript Implementations
RDN-Include is implemented as a CGI script.
This approach, however, requires that the local system
administrator installs the CGI script. In some places this may
be a barrier: institutions may not be willing to install CGI
scripts from third parties.
In order to address this problem, a lightweight alternative has
been developed using JavaScript. This solution is called
RDNI-lite.
The RDN-Include Architecture
The RDN-Include Solution
End-user interaction is handled by the RDN-Include script,
thus retaining an institutional URL. If the script is not passed
any search parameters, it reads a template file held locally.
The template file is essentially
a normal HTML or XHTML
Web page, formatted with a
local look-and-feel.
Institutional
Web server
RDN
Web server
Template
Template
RDN-Include
Search
RDN content (the search box
RDN
gateways
and browse hierarchy) is added
End-user
to this template dynamically at run
time by including in it XML ‘rdni:tag’ elements of the form:
<rdni:tag val="RDN*"/>
where * represents a unique service identifier.
The RDNI-lite Solution
Institutional
RDN
To use RDNi-Lite an author
Web server
Web server
Results
simply has to embed a
Search
template
JavaScript <script> element
HTML
rdnilite.pl
page
in a normal HTML page. The
‘src’ attribute of the script
RDN
gateways
element points to a CGI Perl
End-user
script running on the RDN server.
The CGI script generates a set of document.write()
JavaScript statements that, when executed by the Web
browser, embed the appropriate RDN content into the Web
page. The CGI script takes several optional arguments
that provide ‘rdni:tag’.
Applicability to News Feeds
Need For News Feeds
The RDN wishes to make news available to the user
community. It makes use of RSS to provide news channels.
RSS-xpress
An RSS tool called
RSS-xpress has been
created which allows
RSS channels to be
created, modified and
parsed.
RSS-xpress is
available at
<http://rssxpress.
ukoln.ac.uk/>.
RSS-xpress lite
For institutions to incorporate news
feeds on their own Web site they will
have to install RSS-xpress and
configure it to include local branding.
As this may be a barrier, a
JavaScript version has been
developed. This allows RDN (and
other) news feeds to be managed by
HTML authors.
RDN-Include and RSS-xpress are open source.
For further information on these tools or on this paper
please contact Andy Powell <[email protected]>.