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ECL - eduSource Communications Layer connector software by ScottLeslie
One of the most interesting thing about the project is the eduSource Communications Language (ECL). The Interoperability of Learning Object Repositories and Services: Standards, Implementations and Lessons Learned is a paper about ECL.
Key folks involved with ECL: Marek Hatala and Griff Richards.
Closing the Interoperability Gap: Connecting Open Service Interfaces with Digital Repository Interoperability is a paper on hooking up ECL and the MitOki.
Griff Richards handed me a copy of INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORKS FOR LEARNING OBJECT REPOSITORIES.
ECL API installation notes -- maybe the most technical notes on ECL right now. The best place for ECL documents now seems to be Laboratory for Ontological Research (LORE) maintained by Marek and his staff.
Edusplash federated search demo
Efforts to figure out ECL
A lot of what is written below will soon be rewritten based on what I'm learning from writing Timmy Eap. He programmed some PythonLanguage code at Implementation of ECL on Python.
Reading the papers listed above were useful in getting a conceptual overview of ECL. ECL API installation notes provides a lot of technical details. I then downloaded the current distribution and unzipped it. The package (instructions, code) is geared to Java programmers -- and Java interfaces are provided. (In my understanding of ECL, I don't think that there is necessarily any special tie between Java and ECL -- at this point, Java is the implementation language for ECL; however, the papers don't make that point very clearly.)
Although I can go through the Java setup instructions, I wanted to see how fast it would be for us (who have been using PythonLanguage and WebServices) to make sense of ECL. Hence I had to dive into the full technical specification of ECL -- which is included in the zip package (but which, as far as I can see, is not posted separately.) My goal was to formulate a SOAP request to query one of the ECL-enabled repositories. The Edusplash federated search demo lists some of the repositories that are available. However, I need to get at the physical parameters for an actual SOAP endpoint. That's where the ip_address_config.xml comes in, which contains excerpts like:
<endpoint id="1" name="Pond" logo="splash.gif">
<service_name>urn:search_service</service_name>
<url>http://209.87.57.50:8080/axis/services/urn:search_service
</url>
</endpoint>
