What I'm thinking about is basically a classification system, for use in classifying educational content such as videos, PDFs, wikipedia pages, and also local applications and linking it all to educational courses to make it easy to search for.
So say two schools are training people in different courses, but have the exact same broad range of educational content on their computers. The content in a big variety of forms. We would be able to define a simple outline of a maths course. Perhaps just by creating a set of tags or nested categories representing the different topics covered. Then we could classify any relevant content we have by linking it to the tags/categories. We could do the same for the other school's course.
A user would be able to browse and search through all the different content of every type from one interface. Allowing them to easily find learning or teaching materials. There would ideally be a fair amount of flexibility and overlap in the system. So if we say that one course is the maths section of a certain country's curriculum, then a user could find the content relating to it by browsing by country, then subject, then grade level (advanced/beginner) and then individual mathematical topic (depending how detailed the classifications are), but they could also browse first by grade level, then subject, and see all the maths content for every country.
It would also be great if content could be indexed and searched. And this would all have to be done locally.
Although I've mentioned courses and schools a lot, the software would basically just be classification and search/browsing, not course or curriculum management software.
Is there any software that would be able to build up this sort of structue? I'm sure something similar could be achieved through tools like sharepoint but this would be run on individual machines, not on a network so I'd like a ubuntu desktop app.
I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious here or just thinking about this in entirely the wrong way...
The machines are currently running edubuntu with some extra software and content added.
Also, if a tool for this does not exist, then development is a possibility. In fact, I'd rather like to take it on as a project for my final year in college, but I wanted to see if there's any existing software that could solve the problem first.
EDIT NUMBER 2:
Looking around a bit more I see more similarities between what I want and various tools like existing Enterprise Content Management Systems, Document Management Systems and also web CMS. All of them seem like fairly weighty options though and in the case of things like the document management systems I'm not sure how simple they can be made to use.
Do you think any of them would be flexible enough to give this level of classification and also have a really simple end-user interface. Of course it would still be much better to have a proper desktop application than running a webserver, database server and app on top, as these would be very low spec computers.
This would have to be usable by people with very low levels of computer literacy (third world deployments)