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Metadata Watch Report #2

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Section 3 - Domain reports

3.1 Audio-visual sector
3.2 Educational sector
3.3 Academic sector
3.4 Geographical information sector
3.5 Publishing sector

3.2 Educational sector

1. REVIEW AND UPDATE OF ACTIVITIES

The four main initiatives in the domain of education, identified in the report for April, were:

a. IEEE LTSC LOM

b. DC-Education

c. CEN/CENELEC ISSS LTWS

d. ISO/IECJTC1 SC36

These are still the main standards-related activities. Little seems to have happened over the last three months in both DC-Education and ISO/IECJTC1 SC36.

The IEEE LTSC LOM group held a meeting in Montreal in June, where substantial progress was made, mainly on the scope of the work to be undertaken for a 'version 1.0' standard, and on the proper notation for the specification. Both these issues were resolved with a large degree of consensus, and it seems like the document may be forwarded for ballot in the Fall of 2000.

The CEN/CENELEC ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop accepted a final workplan with recommendations for further work to be funded by the European authorities. A substantial part of the proposed work is concerned with metadata, including work on vocabularies and taxonomies, profiles, bindings and internationalisation of metadata. The second phase of this workshop will be launched in October, at an open meeting in Brussels.

Around the four standardisation activities mentioned above, a large number of projects, consortia and other initiatives are actively developing specifications, tools and infrastructures. As was mentioned in the previous report (April 2000): 'There is also considerable overlap in the work of the different consortia (ADL, AICC, ARIADNE, IMS, etc.) that work on actual implementations of the metadata related and other standards. This does not seem to be a problem, the less so as all these consortia contribute to the development of the standards, and then adapt them to the needs of their constituencies, a process referred to as 'profiling' in the standards world. In fact, having several independent implementations of the metadata standards is a good thing, as it increases the probability that problems or shortcomings will be identified early on. It would be most useful though to have some interoperability development taking place now that the specifications and implementations are maturing, so as to prove that the standard does indeed serve its ultimate goal.'

Below, we briefly review some recent developments in a number of the more relevant such organisations:

- The ARIADNE project (1995-2000) recently transformed into a permanent Foundation, which should become self sustainable, after some initial support from the European Commission. One of the most important aims of the Foundation is to organise the further development and exploitation of the Knowledge Pool System, a distributed database of reusable learning components, with associated metadata that describe them. The ARIADNE infrastructure includes tools for indexation, query, course building, etc. ARIADNE and IMS (see below) jointly submitted their metadata specification to the IEEE LTSC and continue to collaborate on this issue.

- The IMS 'global learning consortium' released in May a version 1.1 of its metadata specification, a minor update to the previous version (changing all element names to lower case) 'conducted in close cooperation with the IEEE Learning Objects Metadata working group'. Also relevant in this context is the IMS Content Packaging specification, which enables the combination of learning materials into interoperable, distributable packages, and the IMS Content Management specification, which lays out the management and run-time interactions required of learning content.

- The Advanced Distributed Learning initiative was launched in 1997 by the US Department of Defense. In January, ADL released version 1.0 of the 'Sharable Course Object Reference Model (SCORM)'. This reference model includes an XML based Course Structure Format, an API for the runtime environment, and different profile of the IEEE LTSC LOM. Since January, developers have started to implement the model, which culminated in the so-called plug-fest in May. In parallel, a test suite for SCORM is being developed. ADL explicitly refers to IMS, and IEEE LTSC.

- MICROSOFT: In February, Microsoft released the Learning Resource iNterchange (LRN) toolkit. LRN is an XML based content interchange specification, based on the content packaging specification developed by IMS. An 'LRN-Viewer' can be downloaded. This software relies on XSL to present an LRN resource as a DHTML document, with a navigation panel to the left, and the content itself in a right panel. Microsoft explicitly refers to IMS, ADL, IEEE LTSC and ARIADNE.

>>Section 3.3 Academic sector

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 07 August 2001