OurStoriesXML

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

Some fields will 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, are optionally entered from the interviewers, or filled in by reviewers or teachers going over the stories afterwards.

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:

• Title - the title for link text on 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 school/organization which collected the recording, e.g., "UNICEF", "Khairat School"
• Country
• City/Town
• Short description
• Language
• Keyword tags
• Geodata (latitude & longitude)

All fields should contain UTF-8 text strings.

Other fields to be added:

• Name of server used to upload
• multiple authors
  • Transcribers
  • Translators
  • Dubbing/translation notes

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
• John Huang
• ...