Confolio - personal and shared portfolios

Introduction

Confolio gives users a convenient place to store and share material that is easily accessible from wherever you are as long as you have access to the Internet. You can upload files, link to online content such as videos, photos, lectures or even create content directly in Confolio. When needed, material can be organized into folders and be described using established metadata standards.

Features

By default Confolio provides users with a personal portfolio where they can upload, create and link to material. In addition, a user may be granted further rights in other portfolios, or folders inside of portfolios, where he can contribute. Users may also be divided into groups which are then used to specify access.

In Confolio, a piece of material is referred to as an entry and consist of a resource, describing metadata and administrative information. Resources are often  content, for example uploaded files, folders, or linked webpages. Resources may  also be abstract entities that have no digital representation such as concepts or yet to be published books. Metadata is always used to describe the resource while the administrative information is used to describe both the resource and the metadata. Administrative information contains information such as modification date, creators, contributors, access control, type of resource etc. From this terminology we see that a link can be described as an entry where the resource is external to Confolio. Furthermore, in certain situations, for example when refering to material in digital libraries, not only the material is external but the metadata as well. Confolio supports entries refering to external metadata and letting the "local" metadata expression complement or contextualize the external metadata.

Confolio provides an intuitive user-interface to navigate hierarchical folders in a portfolio as well as follow crosslinks between portfolios. The user may choose between opening entries and selecting them. When selecting an entry its metadata is shown and, if possible, an inline view of its resource is shown beside it. When opening an entry a separate browser window is used to show the resource unless it is a folder in which case the user-interface simply switches to show that folder instead. The user-interface also provides a tree-view where the user can get an overview of the folder structure in a portfolio. Users can also search for material based on its metadata, no content based search is available at this time.

Technical details

Confolio is a webapplication that relies on a REST API for resource management provided by an underlying framework called SCAM. The Confolio user-interface is built using the DOJO javascript toolkit. The metadata is expressed using the RDF language (Resource Description Framework) and allows a wide range of expressions using combinations of established metadata standards. To hide the complexity of metadata standards and the RDF language, Confolio relies on the SHAME library to display and edit metadata in a user-friendly manner.