Category Archives: metadata

UKOER 2nd Tuesday on Metadata

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On Tuesday 11 August, John and I are running an online workshop on metadata in the “second Tuesday” series of support workshops for the HE Academy/JISC UKOER programme. These are my thoughts on what we will cover: I want the session to be as interactive as possible, starting now, so if you’re involved in the UKOER programme and have any comments on what you would like to see covered please use the comments box below, or contact me direct. We intend that the session will be roughly a 50:50 mix of presentation and discussion for a little over an hour, and then open Q&A.

Session aims

  1. Make sure the projects know about CETIS and our role in the UKOER programme.
  2. Make sure the projects are familiar with the programme level technical & metadata requirements.
  3. Get projects to think about their own metadata and technical requirements.
  4. Discuss the relationship of the third of these to the first two.

Out of scope: IPR, Creative Commons and other legal issues; issues relating to the Jorum that don’t directly relate to the broad aims above (e.g. Jorum deposit procedure).

Who should attend
Discussion will largely be technical or library oriented, but will require an understanding of project aims and objectives: we want to talk about solutions to real problems.

Preparation required: the rough outline below includes some information and indicative questions for participants to be thinking about. Useful reading: OER Programme Technical Requirements; Metadata Guidelines for the OER Programme; Open Educational Resources, metadata, and self-description.

Rough outline of session
Intend roughly 50:50 mix of presentation and discussion, for a little over an hour, and then open Q&A. The presentation/discussion part will cover:

  • (briefly) what is CETIS.
  • CETIS’s role in the UK OER programme.
  • What is metadata, what is it for?
  • Programme technical and metadata requirements, what do these support.
  • Content aggregation: who, what, when, where, why?
  • Project technical contexts, expectations and requirements.

The last item will require input from participants, e.g. what hosts are you using (repository, just a website, web 2.0 / social sharing sites, just the Jorum), how do you think users will find your resources, what will you do to facilitate that; what information could you provide information to support resource selection and use, how would you gather that information and what format would you provide it in?

IEEE LOM Update

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The other day I took part in one of the FlashMeetings that are periodically convened by Erik Duval (chair of the IEEE LTSC LOM working group) concerning maintenance and development of the IEEE LOM standard. There are no entirely new developments since my last LOM update, but since it is over a year since that update I guess it is worth posting a quick reminder and latest news about what is happening.

1. Reaffirmation
The IEEE have now reaffirmed the LOM data schema (1484.12.1), which means that it continues as a standard for another 5 years.

2. Corriegenda
We discussed Draft 5 of the corriegenda (which fixes some known issues in the LOM without making substantive changes to the standard). A couple of new mistakes in the documentation have been identified and rectified, see the draft document for details. Those on the call believe that we identified all changes that are necessary to turn this draft into the final version. This will be circulated on the LTSC LOM mailling list soon. (Many thanks to Javier Godoy who has been leading this work.)

3. Expressing LOM in the Dublin Core Abstract Model
Unfortunately this wasn’t discussed. The DCMI IEEE LTSC Taskforce section of my last update on Dublin Core represents pretty much the latest I’ve heard on this.

Like my son said when we were stuck behind some agricultural vehicles the other week: “things with big wheels and big engines move more slowly than smaller things”.

Automatic Metadata Generation

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JISC have funded strand of projects looking at Automatic Metadata Generation (AMG) under the JISC Information Environment Programme. To support this strand there is a project gathering use cases for automatic metadata generation gathering information on scenarios and use cases for why we might want automatically generated metadata. You can see the scenarios gathered so far on the projects website, and the project are keen to gather as many more as possible. I would also recommend anyone that with an interest go to their workshop on 7 July in Leicester (it’s co-located with the startup meeting for the JISC Programme). This workshop will be an opportunity to review and discuss specialist reports on automatic metadata generation on the following a range of topics such as subject metadata, person-related metadata, workflows, and others. The project has also produced a useful annotated bibliography.

LMAP Scoping Study draft report

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Some time back I started a scoping study into a potential Learning Materials Application Profile (LMAP) for the JISC. Well, I have at last written a draft report that is fit to be read by others, for comment.

It is rather long, and I don’t expect that anyone will want to do any more than look at the section that is relevant to your own interests. But if anyone is interested in taking a sneak preview then do please have a look and let me know of anything you spot that is wrong or misleading. (In my opinion it gets better as it goes along.)

I have some more work to do on it, filling in references, adding acknowledgments etc, that will take me a couple of weeks at least. Any comments received before I get those finished will be considered in the final report submitted to JISC.

Update, 11 Dec 2008: Thank you for your comments. The report as submitted to JISC is now available. I’m hoping they don’t want too many changes made.

FRBRizing learning materials

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I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I wanted an example for showing how the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) might be applied to a typical learning resource. I’m not entirely sure that there is such a thing as a typical learning resource, but the OpenYale online lectures seemed seemed like reasonable candidates. I chose one on Newton’s Laws of Motion as my example because it’s a subject I like. I’m no expert on FRBR. If I was I would probably have known better than to choose a complex aggregation of different media types as my example (but would that have been typical?). Anyway, with some help from John Robertson, I came up with the diagram below. (It doesn’t quite model the example: I’ve modelled overhead display content in PowerPoint rather than in chalk.)
Application of FRBR model to online course unit

I’ve described the modelling and rationale in some more detail in a separate document [pdf].

I would warmly welcome any comments, suggestions and pointers to where I’ve gone wrong.

IEEE LOM Update

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Here’s a quick update on current activity by Erik Duval and others on the IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata ahead of an IEEE LTSC meeting next week. In summary the LOM has been reaffirmed as an IEEE Standard, will be corrected through a corrigendum, is converging with other metadata approaches and may possibly be renewed in the light of what we have learned about metadata since it was designed. Continue reading →

LMAP Update

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The story so far: through the learning materials application profile scoping study we are investigating the metadata requirements when storing learning materials in a repository. The first news to tell you is that we wont be finishing at the end of January as originally planned, but will have a draft report available by the end of February. Most importantly at the moment we have a straw man model that we hope to use in the analysis that we would welcome comments on.
Continue reading →