ICE: The Integrated Content Environment
The Integrated Content Environment (ICE) is a free web content management system produced by the University of Southern Queensland. Initially developed by staff at the university to produce course content for online and print delivery, it has also been used for general web site development, and to manage documents in project intranets.
Features
One of the key features of ICE is its word processor integration. Authors work in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, a free alternative, and ICE converts their content into usable, self-contained course web sites in IMS package format. ICE encourages best-practice word processing techniques, such as use of styles to structure documents. Users are generally more productive using ICE than they were before they learned about the system. |
The ICE application architecture
Architecture
ICE installs as a desktop application and runs with a web interface. A user's content is available in the file system on their own computer. Behind the scenes, ICE manages a complete version history for all files, via the open source Subversion revision control system. ICE uses standard web protocols to maintain content in a Subversion repository.
Courseware
USQ is a premier distance educator, starting decades ago with print publishing, and now offering flexible, hybrid delivery of course on and off campus across multiple media. A growing group of pilot users have been using the system to produce content for web, CD and print delivery. ICE allows authors to work directly on their content, have it committed safely to a version controlled repository and for editorial and support staff to contribute to and format the content if required. Significant savings are expected over existing workflows, as ICE replaces several manual processes.
Beyond courseware
ICE is not just for courseware though. It has been used for producing web sites at USQ and in managing hundreds of project documents, and project web sites.
ICE offers great flexibility because of it's loosely tied architecture. It uses the word processor as a print engine, avoiding complicated and expensive development of print stylesheets; allowing authors and their assistants to have fine-grained control over the look of their content.
This document, for example, is written using ICE. You might be looking at it as a two-sided colour print document, or as a web page. Or you could be viewing the presentation version, generated automatically by ICE from the 'slides' embedded in the source document as simple word processing tables.
ICE is more flexible than typical single source publishing systems. It does not use a strict schema to control content, but it does use XML in a standard document format at the back-end to ensure that content can be preserved for the long term.
ICE for Research and Scholarship: ICE-RS
A new project to extend ICE for research and scholarship, called ICE-RS, will run from November 2006 to the end of 2007, as part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An Innovative Action Plan for the Future.
ICE-RS will involve pilots at several institutions across Australia, and globally. We are seeking researchers working on papers and books, as well as research students and their supervisors.
For articles, the aim is to test ICE as a way to manage the writing process. Pilots will try to track the entire process of reporting on research, and assist in submission to conferences and journals. Once a paper is ready we will explore the practicality of having ICE re-format a paper to journal standards. Upon acceptance of the paper we will automate its ingestion into an institutional repository.
The ICE-RS project will explore other ideas, such as publishing calendar of deadlines for a research project, submission dates for papers, review dates for theses and so on.
A pilot of ICE as the vehicle for managing an electronic journal is already under way. The e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is an international peer-reviewed electronic journal. e-JIST is now produced using ICE, and documents are ported into another content management system.
See: http://www.usq.edu.au/e-jist/
For research theses, ICE will provide safe backups for the chapters of a thesis, and new features will allow a supervisor to add annotations and ratings. Other features under consideration include dashboard reporting of word counts and numbers of citations per chapter. For both research publications and theses key requirement are reference and citation management as well as full-text search and automated navigation generation for large document sets.
Getting involved
Why not get involved? There are many ways which users can contribute to the development of ICE. Just as the pilot users at USQ have provided feedback that has been the main drive, the development team is open to any feedback and ideas from all types of users. The first step is to simply try it out, or better yet become an ICE-RS partner.
