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XForms and Orbeon are very interesting tools for developing metadata management tools. The ONIX developers have used this stack to produce an interface for ONIX-PL called OPLE that people should try out. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/pals3/onixeditor.aspx Questions about Orbeon relate to performance and integrability, but I think it's an impressive use of XForms nonetheless. - Eric On Nov 12, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Ethan Gruber wrote: > Hello all, > > Over the past few months I have been working on and off on a research > project to develop a XForms, web-based editor for EAD finding aids that runs > within the Orbeon tomcat application. While still in a very early alpha > stage (I have probably put only 60-80 hours of work into it thus far), I > think that it's ready for a general demonstration to solicit opinions, > criticism, etc. from librarians, and technical staff. > > Background: > For those not familiar with XForms, it is a W3C standard for creating > next-generation forms. It is powerful and can allow you to create XML in > the way that it is intended to be created, without limits to repeatability, > complex hierarchies, or mixed content. Orbeon adds a level on top of that, > taking care of all the ajax calls, serialization, CRUD operations, and a > variety of widgets that allow nice features like tabs and > autocomplete/autosuggest that can be bound to authority lists and controlled > access terms. By default, Orbeon reads and writes data from and to an eXist > database that comes packaged with it, but you can have it serialize the XML > to disk or have it interact with any REST interface such as Fedora. > > Goals: > Ultimately, I wish to create a system of forms that can open any EAD > 2002-compliant XML file without any data loss or XML transformation > whatsoever. I think that this is the shortcoming of systems such as Archon > and Archivists' Toolkit. I want to integrate authority lists that can be > integrated into certain fields with autosuggest (such as corporate names, > people, and subjects). If there is demand, I can build a public interface > for viewing the entire EAD collection, complete with solr for faceted browse > and search, but this is secondary to producing a form that people with some > basic archiving knowledge and EAD background can use to easily and > effectively create finding aids. A public interface is the easy part, in > any case. It wouldn't take more than a week or two to build something > fairly nice and robust. > > Here is the link: http://beta.scholarslab.org:9080/cocoon/eaditor/ > > I should stress that the application is *not complete.* I am using cocoon > for providing a list of EAD content in the system. I will remove that > application eventually and utilize Orbeon's internal pipelining features to > achieve the same objective. I haven't delved too deeply into Orbeon's > pipelines yet. > > Here are some things to note: > > 1. If you click on a link to open the main part of the guide or any of its > components, you have to click the "Load" link on the top of the form. Forms > aren't being loaded on page load yet. > 2. Elements that accept mixed content per the EAD 2002 schema (e.g. > paragraphs) only accept PCDATA. I haven't worked on mixed content yet; it > is by far the most challenging aspect of the project. > 3. I only have a few C-level elements available to add. > 4. Not all did elements are available yet. > 5. A lot of the generic attributes, like type and label, are not available > for editing yet. This may be the type of thing that is best customized per > institution relative to their own best practices. I don't want more input > fields than necessary right now. > 6. The only thing you can add into the archdesc right now is the <dsc>. > Once I finish all of the c-level elements, I can just put some xi:includes > into the archdesc XForm file to show them in the archdesc level. > > I think those are the major issues for now. As I stated earlier, this is > sort of a pre-alpha. The project is open source and available (through svn) > to anyone who wants it. http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/ . I have put > together an easy package to get the application up and running without > difficulty. All you have to do is unzip the download, go into the apache > tomcat folder and execute the startup script. This assumes you have nothing > running on port 8080 already. > > Download page: http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/downloads/list > > Wiki instructions: > http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/wiki/QuickstartInstallation?ts=1257887453&updated=QuickstartInstallation > > Comments, questions, criticism welcome. The editor is a sandbox. Feel free > to experiment. > > Ethan Gruber > University of Virginia Library Eric Hellman President, Gluejar, Inc. 41 Watchung Plaza, #132 Montclair, NJ 07042 USA [log in to unmask] http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/