OXCRI - integrated use of XCRI at Oxford University
OXCRI is a project to unify the delivery of information about continuing professional development courses at Oxford using XCRI.
The University's Computing Services, Careers Service, and Department of Continuing Education have created web services to share and aggregate information in a neutral XML format about their extensive program of courses for students and staff.
1. Aims and objectives
The project aim is dynamic production of Oxford CPD courses in XCRI
format. We have
- Generated XCRI CAP from three different existing datasets
- Aggregated the information locally via a skills portal
- Reported on appropriateness of the schema for this type of data
- Experimented with using XCRI for internal management of course data
A more detailed report is available in report.xml.
2. XCRI data feeds
- The OUCS course feed is documented at http://active.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oucs/courses/xcri/oxcap.php
- The Skills Portal feed is at http://www.skillsportal.ox.ac.uk/oxcri/cap.php
- The Continuing Education feed is at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oxcri/conted.xml
3. Software
In order to experiment with ‘business rules’, and to
use extra XML validators,
we have reimplemented the CAP schema natively in
RELAX NG, and enhanced it with Schematron rules to make the data
constraints even more precise. When used with an editor like oXygen
which can read documentation elements, helpful tooltips are
available for each element. The relevant files are
- RELAX NG XML syntax schema
- RELAX NG XML compact syntax schema
- W3C syntax schema (converted from above)
- NVDL schema, which additionally validates any embedded XHTML; this also uses a schema for Dublin Core
4. Project methodology
The three participating units joint developed PHP scripts and templates to produce XCRI CAP from their existing database systems storing course details. The XCRI CAP is delivered through standard web servers as REST services.