The Wikiwijs website was launched December 14 by the Dutch minister of education as an open environment in which every teacher can find, use and adapt learning materials for any educational level. Wikiwijs search is powered by KennisNet’s EduRep platform which is based on Meresco.
Wikiwijs Search
The search part of Wikiwijs connects to EduRep to carry out search queries entered by the users of wikiwijs.nl. EduRep returns IEEE LOM records and wikiwijs in turn displays these nicely formatted on the result page. Wikiwijs offers further refinement options by presenting selectors for the desired educational level and target audience.
Educational level
Users interested in certain educational levels, say MBO, can select these in a box besides the search results and press the button to update the result. We searched for luchtkwaliteit and the system responded with 263 results. We then selected MBO and the results are narrowed down to 193 results on MBO level.
Use of faceted search
If we select PO, SBaO and SO instead of MBO, the system responds with: no results found and suggest to remove filters and “hopefully Wikiwijs will find more”. It would be preferable if Wikiwijs would hide selectors that do not yield any results. The underlying search interface of EduRep gives this information, as can be seen in this query: SRU Query. It request a facet on the field lom.educational.context.value, which tells us the amount of matching records for each of the education levels. We hope that a future version of Wikiwijs will take advantage of this feature.
Technology
Wikiwijs connects to EduRep using the SRU protocol, a standard from The Library Of Congress. The SRU service is implemented with Meresco, which adds the extension parameter x-term-drilldown. This extension allows a client to request faceting on a given metadata field. For more information see Meresco Public Interfacs.odt in the Technical Documentation.
The response to the SRU query above would contain the following XML:
<dd:drilldown xsi:schemaLocation=”…”>
<dd:term-drilldown>
<dd:navigator name=”lom.educational.context.value”>
<dd:item count=”193″>BVE</dd:item>
<dd:item count=”4″>VO</dd:item>
<dd:item count=”3″>HBO</dd:item>
</dd:navigator>
</dd:term-drilldown>
</dd:drilldown>