From Open Sustainability
The Integrated Content Repository brings together the open assets from the open-sustainability framework, shared assets available on the internet and internally held assets. The Integrated Content Repository is a virtual hub of assets that can be used by an Information Management community, some of which are publicly available and some of which are held internally.
Any organisation can integrate their internally held assets to the open standard provided by FISDev in order to:
- Build community
- Create a common standard for Sustainable Development
- Share leading intellectual property
- Promote a comprehensive and compelling set of offerings
- Collaborate with the business units to integrate messaging and coordinate sales activities
- Reduce costs through reuse and improve quality through known assets
The Integrated Content Repository is a true Enterprise 2.0 solution: it makes use of the collaborative, user-driven content built using Web 2.0 techniques and technologies on the Enterprise 2.0 site and incorporates it internally into the enterprise. The approach followed to build this repository is referred to as a Mashup.
Asset Types
There are 3 classes of Assets as part of the architecture:
- Open Assets
- Shared Assets (Open and Private)
- Private Assets
These assets are mapped together to form a common standard for Sustainable Development.
Open Assets
Open Assets are provided through the FISDev Methodology. FISDev provides a method-based approach to Sustainable Development through best practices developed by a common community. Everything classified as an Open Asset sits physically hosted on the open methodology wiki site and is made available under the creative commons license.
Content on the open site can be classified as either core content or non-core content. Core content provides the more stable aspects of the FISDEV Methodology and only changes as part of a release cycle (this approach goes in effect once the beta period of the Baseline Release is over. Non-core content is more dynamic in nature and can be changed by any contributor at any time.
Shared Assets
Shared Assets are assets that have been made available to the public and which are linked onto the open-sustainability site through common metadata. Shared Assets may be in many forms, including wikis, blogs, whitepapers, online books or code. Shared Assets are divided into two categories, based on the extent to which they can be changed.
Shared-Open Assets
Shared-Open Assets are assets that have been made available to the public and which are linked onto the open-sustainability site through common metadata. These assets are open for other contributors to change but may not be hosted on the open-sustainability site.
Examples of Shared-Open assets include:
- An article on Water footprinting on Wikipedia
- A tool to measure complexity population growth
- A published standard
Shared-Open Assets are effectively any content that is publicly available that can be used to shape the standard for Sustainable Development. As these assets are open, they can be considered fully part of the FISDev approach as they can be specifically applied to extend the Framework. It should be noted that they will typically serve other purposes as well.
The dynamic nature of some content must be considered (e.g. a page on Wikipedia changing).
Shared-Private Assets
Shared-Private Assets are assets that have been made available to the public and which are linked onto the open-sustainability site through common metadata. Although they have been built in a collaborative form, these assets are not changeable by the broader community.
Examples of Shared-Private assets include:
- A whitepaper on the impact of carbon emissions in India
- Published case studies on the use of FISDev
Maturity rating of this content is important as is the ability to specifically link into to the method to add value to the aggregation process.
Private Assets
Private Assets are content that is held internally and not shared with the public, but which have been linked into the open-sustainability site through common metadata. It is "guarded IP" that is behind the firewall and is only directly accessible by an internal group of users. Users of these private assets are under no obligation to make their private assets known although they are encouraged to share content or its benefits with the open community. Anyone can map in their own assets to the open method, i.e. they do not need to have been produced as part of a project that used the framework.
In addition to functional tags, content ideally should be Peer Reviewed and Maturity Rated, using governance standards put forward as part of the open framework.
Information Management Asset Association
Information Assets are associated through the use of common metadata tags that are part of the FISDev Methodology. Listed below are the key mechanisms for linking open, client, shared and private assets.
Meta-Model
- The Meta-model is defined through a common language for The meta-model is defined through the categories stored in the open methodology wiki.
Tagging
- Tagging applies and generates metadata assets used to link internal, open and publicly available assets in a folksonomy-based approach. These tags form the IP that is loaded into the meta-model. Example tags include:
Articles in the wiki use a common set of categories to classify assets. Bookmarked articles use these common categories as tags.
Search
- Search techniques can be applied across federated repositories and are configured to search on assets within the wiki and through selected repositories. On the site there is currently an independent search capability for the FISDEV Wiki and Openmethodology Bookmarks. This is provided by Google Custom Search. At the same time, MediaWiki's internal search feature is still available, because it provides more granular search functionality within the wiki.
Social Bookmarking
- Social Bookmarking techniques are applied to link in content off the site into the open methodology. The common tags that are part of the open methodology wiki are used to link in external assets.
Transclusion
- Transclusion is used to include part of article into another artcile by reference. In terms of the Content Repository, it is used to include content from the open site into private asset repositories.
Information Management Asset Repository
The FISDev Methodology provides the single Integrated Content Repository that is available from the open site. User communities can also have their private content repositories where they link into FISDev by applying Enterprise 2.0 techniques and technologies.
Any organisation can integrate their internally held assets to the open framework provided by FISDev.
- Asset Lineage allows assets to be traced across the environment, linked together through the open method. The lineage can be displayed in a graphical form.
- Reports can be generated against the common metadata repository. Standard reports should be able to view data lineage, asset history and overall set of contributions.
- The Security Model provides a mechanism for users to customise what aspects of their content (if any) they want shown as being part of the open method, i.e. users can map their assets into the open method through tags but do not need to expose this information. Users ultimately control what they would like to expose.
- Configuration Management of asset metadata is stored in the repository to ensure they are stored in the correct fashion and with the last version. Versioning provides the ability for looking back into the history of assets.
