kurator software version beta 1.0 (2008)
description
Version 1.0 of kurator software builds upon an earlier version of the project
beta 0.1. It uses
php and
html, and has an open
API (Application Programming Interface) allowing users writing software that directly queries the data store.
At the point of collecting content to the system, there are two modes of ‘collecting’ source code into the database running in parallel: an open submission
manual upload by users and automatic ‘scraping’ of the Internet by the
web crawler function. A
web crawler (also referred to as a ‘Web spider’ or ‘Web robot’) is a computer program or automated script that browses (‘crawls’) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner, without the human intervention in order to find information. This assures the continuous supply of source code that is subsequently indexed and stored in an internal code
repository. The source code of the kurator software itself is included in the system repository.
In the same way as collecting source code to the repository, indexing is also programmed to allow both manual and automatic mode of gathering information. Automatic indexing is implemented through a custom algorithm that searches comments within the source code, which programmers use to describe the functionality of a section of code, and then tags keywords within these comments, matching them against other comments present in the repository. Thus, regardless of language type, source codes that share similar processes are indexed, instead of matching syntax within one project/language.
Next, users are able to browse the code stored in the repository adding
tags or
comments to projects, folders, files or lines of code. Users can
assign code to create their
displays or mark them for later use. In addition to this, the
auto-kurator module generates displays by the kurator software itself from its own database. Subsequently, the created displays by users and by the kurator software are saved to
archive section. This provides a growing collection of examples of curated displays, including versions of the modified kurator code itself. A commenting system and API for the display function are provided so that anyone can comment on particular examples of created displays and retrieve data to be displayed on external websites.
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