Out of 24 suggestions received for hackfest this year, 8 were picked up. The final presentations for all selected projects are linked next to the suggestions. All the projects were interesting but I'll summarize the top 3 for me here, very briefly.
1. Fac-back-opac : I worked on this project (not really) along with three others and I had a two fold agenda for choosing this - it was about creating an alternate OPAC and underneath the hood it had Python, the programming language I've been waiting to get my hands on. Most of the projects that are centered around building an alternate OPAC follow a similar workflow (including NCSU's Endeca) - export the bib records from ILS, create an index and build a front end that talks to the index. In this project, the underlying ILS is Unicorn, an index is built using solr and front end is done through Django, a web framework for Python. It could be adapted to other ILSes without much of a problem. Dan Scott and a few others have worked on this and the main goal in hackfest was to clean up the code to follow standard Django conventions.
2. Folksonomy Validator: In a nutshell, the aim of this project was to create a hybrid model between folksonomies and controlled vocabulary. By the end of the day, the team working on this project actually built a working model! The way it works is - when a user types in a word to be used as a tag, the system queries a set of sources ( pre selected for that domain) and returns results that could be displayed at one place. This allows the user to select a more appropriate tag to describe the content without actually checking with other sources manually.
3. Specification for user-contributed enhancements: With social networking finding its way into previously silo-ed IT projects, there is a need for a simple way to migrate user-contributed content like comments, tags, etc from system to system (or version to version). This project's goal was to come up with a specification to capture user-contributed content and they did present a schema to address this. The idea is to map user's content into this schema and build tools to import from this schema into other systems..cool.
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