Here are some projects that have been suggested by Andy Powell, who works for UKOLN here at the University of Bath (the UKOLN web pages http://www.ukoln.ac.uk will tell you what they do). Andy is looking for a keen, able student, and he only has time to supervise one student. Please email him if you are interested in any of these projects. Andy's projects are always very interesting and previous students who have undertaken his projects have found them very worthwhile. Claire An OAI screen saver This project will develop an OAI-based screen saver. The work will be split into two halves, a client and a server. The server will gather metadata about images from OAI-compliant images repositories (for example the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection made available by the Library of Congress http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/gottschoabt.html) and store it a local database. Gathering will be done using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol. The client will run as a PC screen saver, connecting to the server on a regular basis to obtain metadata about images at random (perhaps in batches of 20), downloading copies of the images from the remote site, displaying them on a rotating basis as part of the screen saver. Information about OAI is available from http://www.openarchives.org/. Information about developing screen savers is available from http://visualbasic.about.com/library/weekly/aa050701a.htm Language: Perl or Java for the server, VisualBasic for the screen saver RSS reading list creator This project will develop a Web-based reading list creation tool. The tool should be capable of creating lists of references to Web resources, journal articles and books. The list should be stored as an RDF Site Summary (RSS) file and contain links to resources based on URLs and OpenURLs (as appropriate). The project will investigate embedding the tool within the Blackboard VLC as an aid to course creators. The project may also involve some development of UKOLN's OpenResolver, a tool for providing access to the resources listed in the reading list. More information about RSS is available from http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/rss/ and about the OpenURL from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/resolver/. Language: Perl ODRL and P3P Editors This project involves developing two editors: (i) A Web-based Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) editor. The editor should use Web forms to prompt the end-user for the required information and should then create a a machine-readable XML rights statement using ODRL The editor should be able to load ODRL XML files. More information about ODRL is available from http://www.odrl.net/. Language: Perl or Java (ii) A Web-based P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) editor. The editor should use Web forms to prompt the end-user for the required information and should then create a human-readable Web page and a machine-readable XML representation of it. The editor should be able to load P3P XML files created by any P3P compliant tool for updating. More information about P3P is available from http://www.w3.org/P3P/. Language: Perl Andy Powell -- Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933 Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/