JEM Server was down most of Saturday, September 27. The reason for this seems to be a distributed attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddos#Distributed_attack) to our server bringing the server down. We are taking action to prevent this in the future.

The learning repository on the JEM portal now supports some new features. You can now easily register your learning resources on the JEM portal, eg. if you have records elsewhere you may now use it to import the metadata into the JEM repository.

All the records are validated before import, to find out how we did this and a list of new features, visit our repository guide. A description of the LOM Import module along with the code is also available at http://www.jem-thematic.net/node/935.

I'd like to invite you to participate in a little survey on mathematical knowledge items, possible issues with them, and how to solve issues. It will take around 10 minutes to answer the questions.

The results will be used in order to improve the mathematical argumentation ontology that is used in the semantic wiki SWiM and thus the assistance in tracking and solving issues there.

Open call for learning resources on Geometric Series.

Register any resource you have created or used and can recommend on Geometric Series in the JEM repository. Afterwards, reply with the learning resource link here before 15 May 2008.

Online seminar to discuss how to best implement the harvesting search for repositories of mathematical eContent. Everyone is invited, especially those who run such a repository or have experience in harvesting and search.

Invited expert: Julika Mimkes.

See also forum.

A meeting booking has been made for 11-Feb-08 at 08:30 (GMT +0000) and lasting 59 minutes. This meeting booking is for 6 people, please signup for this event so we can reset the number of participants.

Go to the following address for full details and to access the event:

After listening to several talks on repositories, I think JEM should offer an aggregated search of learning resources in mathematics. Single repositories can offer their resources for harvesting, e.g. with OAI. I would like to know which repositories are currently open to this possibility.

Is there any interest on JEM installing a connexions server?

As an experiment, unmoderated comments are now enabled for registered users and for anonymous users. A CAPTCHA, "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", maths question is asked to establish the nature of the poster (human or machine) and to limit spamming. In this way, we hope to increase the interaction with casual readers and promote a more active usage of the JEM portal.

Starting with this newsflash, all node leaders have been subscribed to newsflash tagged by JEM NEWS, JEM PORTAL and JEM EVENT. This means that they will receive an email from admin@jem-thematic.net whenever new content is posted on the JEM portal. Feedback comments to this would be appreciated.

If you are not a node leader, you can subscribe too by using the Subscription tab under My account and by ticking the items that interest you.