Spinning a different kind of WPMU platform with JISCPress

We finished JISCPress. If you’re interested, I’ve written a long overview of the work we’ve done with WPMU as a document discussion platform, based on WriteToReply. You’ll see that the project has, among other things, produced three plugins: digress.it, and two Linked Data plugins that run as background services across the platform, create relationships between documents and document sections and post RDF to the Talis Data Store. Fancy!

3 Replies to “Spinning a different kind of WPMU platform with JISCPress”

  1. “create relationships between documents and document sections”

    Hmmm…. Some time ago I lobbied for (and got funded) a WPMU plugin that could accept an OpenLearn RSS feed that pointed to a list of OpenLearn units, created a separate WPMU blog for each unit, then grabbed the static RSS feed from each unit and used it to populate the corresponding newly set up blog with a series of posts, one per item in each unit feed.

    Got that?

    The plugin can be found here: http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/openlearn/wpopenlearn.html

    So with the cross linking plugin, here’s what I’m thinking…

    i) given an RSS feed of, I dunno, new UK legislation, where each item in the feed is a link to an act; and
    ii) a way of generating a link to an RSS version of each Act from the item link in i); then
    iii) we could subscribe to the feed in i) using the import-and-republish plugin, setting up a new blog for each new act and then importing it from its RSS representation; and
    iv) automatically generate links between relevant sections of each act based on content?

    With a bit of tuning, we’d then have a pattern for ingesting a set of docs from an RSS listing of those docs and automatically generating links between them at the paragraph level?

  2. Yes, sounds almost doable, although the relationships are not specifically made at the paragraph level. The relationships are made at the post level. That’s what gets sent off to the APIs for analysis/extraction. Since the paragraph divisions are specific to digress.it (I don’t know how/when digress.it creates the paragraph divisions) and not WordPress, I imagine that it’s non-trivial to do.

Comments are closed.