OurStoriesXML

This page documents the mark-up language used to keep meta data for interviews recorded by the Our_Stories activity.

The fields would be useful for categorization and searching of the collected audio clips.

some of the fields would be automatically generated during interview recording, ie date and file reference (and probably language and country of origin / geo-data, as those could be automatically appended by the school servers). Other fields, such as description fields and keyword tags would be optionally entered from either the children recording the interviews, or filled in by the teachers or other volunteers reviewing the stories.

Quick Example

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<ourstories version="0.1">
  <story date="2007-10-29 07:13:04" 
         oggfile="/home/olpc/ourstories/story_filename.ogg" 
         title="story_title"/>
</ourstories>

Desired fields as of 12/2007 include (quoting Curtis Chen):

• Title - this title will be used for the link text on the landing pages; if no title is available, we use "Story By <first name of speaker>;" if no name is available, we use "UNTITLED"
• Name of Speaker(s) - if none available, we use "Anonymous"
• Name of Audio File - please avoid using non-alphanumeric characters in filenames (e.g., punctuation and spaces; dashes and underscores are okay)
• Name of Photo - if available; same filename notes as above
• Source - name of organization which collected the recording, e.g., "UNICEF"
• Country
• City/Town
• Short description

All fields should contain UTF-8 text strings.

Other fields

• Fields to be added in next revision: language, country of origin, generic description text field, keyword tags
• Creation related : multiple authors, dubbing/translation in the original
• Transcription and translation related : Transcribers, Translators
• General tags.
• Geodata (lat/long, other)
• Server used to upload

Other data to gather on OurStories

• Narrative flow, unstructured groupings
• External tags / additions to the above (cf. how Connexions does it)

Parsing

• Python parsing snippets for this mark-up format should be made available soon. You could also refer to the code in storymanager.py from the OurStories Activity source. (http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/ourstories)

Versioning

version 0.1 - 10/29/2007

• Initial attempt to define a XML style meta-data mark-up language.
• Fields available: date, oggfile, title as attributes of a story

Interested participants

• Allan Doyle
• ...