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Metadata Watch Report #3

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 | section 3 | section 4 | section 6 ]

Section 5 - Domain reports

5.1 Industry sector
5.2 Publishing sector
5.3 Audio-visual sector
5.4 Cultural Heritage sector
5.5 Educational sector
5.6 Academic sector
5.7 Geographical information sector

5.5 Educational sector

Correspondent: Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

5.5.1 Review and update of activities

The four main standards-related initiatives in the domain of education, are still:

  1. IEEE LTSC LOM
  2. DC-Education
  3. CEN/CENELEC ISSS LTWS
  4. ISO/IECJTC1 SC36

Most of the metadata related activities still take place in the two organisations listed under a and b above.

The IEEE LTSC LOM group held a meeting in Sedona in September, where it was decided to 'open up' the data elements for which vocabularies of appropriate values are defined in the document. The working document has been updated to reflect this change and numerous small edits and modifications. The new version, working document version 5, has been submitted to ballot in the LOM working group. At the same time, members were asked to approve (or not) the forwarding of this document by the IEEE LTSC sponsor and executive committee to the IEEE for full ballot. The next meeting will be held in Athens, Greece.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative met for its 8th workshop in Ottawa in October. It is unclear at this moment whether the DC-Education made any substantial progress at that occasion.

Most noteworthy is that there are new attempts to organize collaboration between LOM and DC-Education.

The CEN/CENELEC ISSS Learning Technologies Workshop launched the second phase of its existence at a meeting in October in Brussel. As mentioned in the previous report, a substantial part of the proposed work is concerned with metadata, including work on vocabularies and taxonomies, profiles, bindings and internationalization of metadata. It seems very likely that European funding will be available to support the workshop. The next meeting will be held in January in Brussel.

5.5.2 Educational metadata application profiles

The attached table (Appendix B) summarizes the elements sets, schemes and technology bindings by some of the main initiatives in this domain: ADL, ARIADNE, DC-Education, EDNA, EUN Schoolnet, GEM, IMS, NEEDS and SMETE. Most of these initiatives were covered in previous reports.

It is clear from this overview that different organisations make different choices to profile the same specification for their communities. With respect to LOM, ARIADNE is clearly the more ambitious profile, as it makes 23 elements mandatory. In comparison, IMS decided to include 20 elements in the 'core' group. ADL only requires 7 of the LOM elements to be provided.

For the DC-based initiatives, it is clear that they all needed to add elements to the basic DC element set. The DC-Education group decided to adopt 4 elements from LOM, and an additional data element. They also decided to add a 'ConformsTo' qualifier to the Relation element. EDNA, Schoolnet and GEM added between 5 and 9 data elements to the basic DC element set. Approver, User Level and Version are common to more than one of these initiatives.

ARIADNE, EDNA and GEM are the more active consortia with regards to the development of vocabularies for data elements. There is some adoption of (mainly GEM related) such vocabularies by other consortia.

The main base technology for implementation is XML.

It is striking to note that, at present, there is little activity on interoperability between independently developed systems for metadata management, like the ones presented above. Some demonstrator work has been done between the ARIADNE and GESTALT consortia, but larger scale developments are rare at this moment.

We believe that it is now time to start this interoperability development, as the specifications and implementations are maturing, and as several communities have developed their own profiles of the specifications involved. In principle, such profiles should not hinder interoperability. But this needs to be demonstrated in practice now.

Only then will we be able to amass a critical quantity of learning material, and will the standards indeed serve their ultimate goal.

As an addendum, note that many smaller scale projects, typically confined to one organisation, are also including metadata in their development efforts. Sometimes, the basic idea is to provide a useful service within the own organisation, and sometimes, the main focus is on further research that requires metadata support as basic functionality.

>>Section 5.6 Academic sector

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 | section 3 | section 4 | section 6 ]

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