Tag: standards

Great Post/Article on Metadata (really!)

http://www.computer.org/multimedia/mu2004/promo1.pdf

Raymond Yee helpfully points out this great article by Dick Bulterman titled “Is it Time for a Metadata Moratorium” from which Raymond extracts this true nugget:

“For nontext data – such as video, images, audio, and so on – direct mining is difficult, but exactly at the point that metadata might be useful, manual creation simply doesn’t get done because creating useful metadata descriptions (the proverbial thousands of words) is not in the critical path of content creation.”

Seems obvious, right? And yet, hyperbolic testimonials to the wonders of flickr and del.icio.us aside, this seems exactly the problem (one of many) that countless repository initiatives seem destined to replicate in positing a repository ‘container’ that isn’t even loosely coupled with either the content creation or content use/re-use environments or workflows. Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa. – SWL

A Repository of Metadata Crosswalks

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/godby/12godby.html

It’s been such an insane couple of weeks for me with work and travel that the best I can do is simply point to this new D-Lib article by Jean Godby and friends. But if her last piece for Ariadne surveying application profiles of the LOM was any indication, you should go read this now. – SWL

CWSpace Poster at SPARC Institutional Repository Workshop

http://cwspace.mit.edu/docs/ProjectMgt/Reports/SPARC-IR-Workshop/sparc-poster.html

Via a post on the Dspace-LOR mailing list by William Reilly of MIT comes mention of this poster concerning various content packaging methods for LOs. The poster was produced for use at the SPARC Institutional Repository Workshop by the CWSpace project, a project investigating the use of Dspace to archive MIT’s Open CourseWare materials. The poster is an awkward size, but well worth a look as it gives a good overview of the issues and some of the alternate approaches to content packaging that are currently converging.

‘I hear that train a coming….’ – SWL

Ariadne Article – ‘What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/

Score one for the librarians!

This article by Carol Jean Godby of the OCLC is an absolute bombshell and a must-read for folks working with learning object metadata standards. She follows up on works by Norm Friesen and Lorna Campbell that survey existing application profiles of the IEEE LOM with a view to answering three main questions:

  1. Which elements are most widely adopted?
  2. What are the prospects for interoperability given these profiles and the entirely optional nature of any of the elements
  3. What can be learnt about the motivation for developing an application profile (a.k.a. why can’t us educational technologist just submit to one standard way of describing things or let the librarians do it)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, like Friesen and Campbell before her, she reports that the most used fields from the LOM can be easily mapped to the existing Dublin Core fields, and that we’re pretty much all over the map when it comes to all of the special ‘pedagogical’ type fields that were supposedly the motivation for this whole exercise in the first place. (more…)
Continue reading “Ariadne Article – ‘What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?’”

New IMS Specification Download Pages and License

http://www.imsglobal.org/specificationdownload.cfm

IMS has a re-designed website, and a fairly unwelcomed addition to getting access to the specification documents. As they state on the individual specification pages “HTML documents may be viewed online, but may not be printed without permission. To download an electronic copy for printing, please go to the specification download page.” I guess this makes some sense. They aren’t restricting access, just asking people to agree to their license, which on the surface seems o.k., though it is not straight boilerplate, and systems implementors will want to think through what if any implications Section II, “License Terms for Implementation” have to them. (That said, I can’t wait to read Stephen’s reaction when he finds out he needs to re-enter his personal data everytime he wants a new copy or a different file) – SWL

Article on ‘Intro to the Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU)’

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/

Related to the last post, this article from the latest issue of Ariadne gives a good introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service, a protocol designed to “define a standard form for Internet search queries as well as the structure of the responses.”
Even if the specific topic isn’t greatly of interest to you, the article may be useful in having one of the most stragithforward explanations of the difference between SOAP and REST-based web services, and why, contrary to all the hype, there is still some value in SOAP-based services. – SWL

Discovery+ : Federated searching of bibliographic resources for elearning

http://devil.lib.ed.ac.uk:8080/dplus/

Via the latest CETIS Quarterly newsletter (thanks Stephen) came news of this interesting U.K.-based project. According to the precis on the E-Learning Framework site, the project will deliver “web services and toolkit[s] capable of searching various library and resource gateways and transforming the search results to reusable and standardised schemas for e-learning purposes.”

If I’ve understood correctly (and it’s entirely possible I haven’t) what will be provided is middleware that will enable the core services of search/expose, request/deliver, and submit/store, across heterogenous repositories (from Z39.50 library systems, to LORs, to Amazon and more) through a single set of web service interfaces. Crikey! – SWL

BC Commons licence

http://www.bccampus.ca/Page93.aspx

It struck me that while there will be quite a few out there who have seen this before, I haven’t seen it make the rounds of the blogosphere and so maybe it is worthwhile…

The BCcommons Licence is a “open content” licence inspired by Creative Commons but aimed specifically at facilitating sharing of content created within the BC post-secondary system with the rest of that system. It has been developed by my employers (and my boss, Paul Stacey) at BCcampus. It’s a kind of middle ground between “closed” content and the full Creative Commons, a way for our provincial system to promote sharing between institutions but hopefully not pushing people as far out of their comfort zone as the full on Creative Commons might. The first content to be released under this licence should be coming along shortly so we will soon see if this fills the anticipated niche and has the desired effect. And a final note: in a cool twist, the BCcommons licence itself has been released under the creative commons, so if it somehow inspires you and you think it could serve as the basis for your own middle way, dig in! – SWL

International LOM Survey

http://phenom.educ.ualberta.ca/n/papers/
LOM_Survey_Report.doc

As mentioned by Stephen, this is the second year Norm Friesen has produced this important report. The survey focuses on two questions: 1) “Which elements were selected for use or population?”; and 2) “How were these elements used, or what where the types of values assigned to them?” Maybe this makes sense as a starting point, but it misses out an even more important question for the builders of repository systems and other consumers of metadata – how are the elements that are selected for use actually employed to deliver functionality to users (or other systems). Maybe that is a premature question, but the current situation resembles a comment a fellow from Oxford made in the Learning Design working group at the Alt-I-Lab sessions a few weeks back – “It’s like you’ve spent all this time working on the data model before you had an idea what the application it was supposed to support was going to be.” Don’t laugh, that’s exactly what this feels like at times.

Which is why the last paragraphs of the paper are so important, the ones in which Norm engages the position laid out by Erik Duval and Wayne Hodgins in their paper titled ‘Metadata Matters.‘ I am sympathetic with Norm’s concern that

“speculations on future developments in technologies and the social practices that develop with them are notoriously prone to error, and especially subject to ideological and other distortions. While the possibilities of such developments and solutions should certainly not be ignored in standards development, they do not provide a solid foundation for standardization work.”

But maybe what this means is that metadata standards need to be driven from two directions that are in tension; one from the direction of studies like Norm’s that look at what fields are currently being populated, but then also from the perspective of current and future usages of the metadata fields so that the limitations of manual metadata collection practices (one of the points I think Hodgins and Duval are trying to make) don’t end up dictating a standard that ultimately doesn’t enable any new functionality (which I thought was supposed to be the reason for all of this to begin with.) – SWL