Atomstore & Atomate are a unified approach to data management and content authoring. The primary emphasis is on simple but controlled creation of web content, and automated content distribution.
The initial incentive for such a system was for content sharing between the main Exeter website and the my.exeter portal. The fact that the underlying data technology is the Atom Syndication Format means subscribable feeds are intrinsic to the system.
Atomstore stores information as an atom-entry. Atom-entries, with your content, automatically become "incorporated" in one or more atom-feeds. Through these feeds, the content is made available to "users" and "systems" subscribing to the feeds.
Think of it in terms of any filestore, your PC, the University's webserver, the entries are like documents or files. The feeds are like folders or directories. The real power of an Atomstore is in the structure and organisation given to the content and it's almost infinite reusability.
Atomate is the web application that enables content providers to very easily create atom-entries and organise them into atom-feeds. It provides the word processor style editor for creating new or editing existing entries. Through Atomate you can upload OpenOffice and (later) MS-Word documents, and (later) media files such as images, podcasts, etc.. Atomate "understands" certain well defined and structured document styles and can convert them into "reusable" content.
Potential use-cases
- "Traditional" News feed ..
as a feed display webpage, also (eventually) available as syndicated feeds in both
[Atom]
and
[RSS2]
formats:
eg. [University News], [Staff News], [Library News] - "Key Personnel" feed
eg. [Vice-chancellor] - Group Informational feed
- eg. [PC Clusters start page] .. uses "news" items from the Support Works helpdesk system and could include a couple of "promotions" (see this version)
- Group Working feed ..
a great way to "document" a project:
eg. [Atomate development], [Developing Module Descriptions] - Site creation / portal integration feed
- eg. [Library] .. [Car Parking] .. [HuSS] .. [SoBE]
- Key Document workflow editing
- eg. [SoBE level-1 Module: BEM1007] .. Module descriptions web pages and their maintainance, including importing original Word documents
- Key Document repository ..
- Document Set feed ..
- Aggregation of feeds .. drawing on several, related, feeds to present information in one place
Status of development
Atomate started as a personal project in the Autumn 2005. I consider it to be at an alpha release level. A beta release could be produced with a weeks work (dedicated time and sympathetic work environment). A full Atomate specification and technical documentation could be produced with another weeks work (same working provisions).
Atomate should be considered as a test "service" while we await the setting up of a virtual server, installation of code libraries, and porting from the test server.