A consistent theme in the knowledge development work done by our users is the creation of resources pertaining to a field of knowledge. The NGRF site, for instance, currently contains 1488 Annotated Reference objects and 236 link objects, while other sites contain 175 detailed literature reviews. Our older portals contain hundreds of very carefully crafted annotatable XML documents and thousands of well-categorised e-learning applets.

However, our portals are not currently doing a good job of leveraging these resources - of providing powerful central interfaces for browsing and searching them, for instance, or rapid tools for creating them. In the case of annotated references and links in the NGRF site, there is the further problem of replicating references and links in order to cite them from multiple content locations; obviously it would be better if the resources were kept centralised and separate from their citation. Another major problem with the resource-base functionality of our current portals is their weak support for categorising and description ('metadata'); the metadata support built into Plone is awkward to use and very difficult to adapt to particular purposes; it more-or-less forces one big 'bag of keywords' on users who want to tag their resources so that they can be sorted, related and discovered in useful ways. This is all the more galling in light of the large amountof work done by KnowNet's principals in the late 90's, specifically directed at powerful large-scale resource repositories, and at standards for structured categorisation and description.

We are now, after much preparatory software-engineering work, in a position to bring our resource-repository work from the late 90's to bear on our current portals. We will shortly be providing interfaces for adding categorical and other metadata to objects, for structured searching and browsing based on these descriptions, and for maintaining vocabularies and taxonomies of descriptive terms. Because we also have an implementation of trackback to base this on, we will be able to make the association of metadata with resources very flexible. We will also be introducing more rapid methods for creating resources, using the MetaWeblog API and 'bookmarklets'. Further work will follow on leveraging the resource aspects of links associated with weblog entries and discussion posts, and on rapid, lightweight 'collecting' and organising of resources into special-purpose repositories (these would complement the repository aspects ofmetadata-based resource-browsing and searching).

Also because of our trackback and other standards implementations, we can straightforwardly distribute / share repositories across sites, and will be in a position to explore doing so across platforms and systems as well.

As an example, when the new repository features are deployed, Annotated References will cease to be 'contained' by the indexFolders which cite them, and duplicate entries will be unnecessary. A central repository of bibliographic references will be maintained, and content which cites them can do so either by a simple trackback ping or a lightweight citation object. Users wanting to cite a reference will be able to rapidly search the repository to see if that reference already exists, and either point to that entry or create a new one. Maintenance issues on the references, such as link-checking and Z39.50 data mining, would then be centralised, since only one copy of the full information would need to be kept in the system.