The UKCMF document is a really useful piece of work and helps to focus
thinking on which bits of LOM are important to us. I have sent some
specific comments on the text of the document to Gerry and Lorna
separately. What follows is some discussion about the general aims behind
developing a UKCMF - i.e. what are we trying to achieve with this? I'm
sending this more widely because I think it is important to have a shared
understanding of why this work is important and what it will be used to
support. Comments on (and rejections of) this message are very welcome!
This work seems to have taken the approach of looking at what other people
have already defined as their 'application profiles' of LOM and trying to
extrapolate from that a view of the most commonly used elements.
Apologies to the authors if this seriously misrepresents the work they
have done. I can understand the rationale behind this approach - but it
is premised on the notion that other people will have the same functional
requirements as we do, and that therefore their choices of elements in the
application profile will be the same as ours?
An 'alternative' approach would be to enumerate our own functional
requirements (what kinds of services do we want to deliver based on this
metadata), then use that as the basis for deciding what elements we need.
Finally, we could compare our results with what other people have come up
with and deal with any obvious anomalies.
I think our functional requirements can be stated very briefly, as follows:
We MUST be able to support:
- keyword searches (based on title, description and keywords in the
metadata)
- title searches (find resources with known titles)
- author searches (find resources by known authors)
We MUST be able to filter the results of those searches based on
- the publisher (only display resources published by the University of
Bath)
- the resource language (only display stuff in English)
- any platform requirements (only display stuff that runs on a Mac)
- educational level (only display stuff that is appropriate for use
in FE)
When resource descriptions are displayed, we MUST be able to show
- copyright info
- resource type
in addition to title, author, publisher, keywords and description.
It is also HIGHLY DESIRABLE that we can offer browse interfaces based on
- subject classification
- publisher
- educational level
I know that people may disagree with details in these functional
requirements - the point is that we should be able to write down fairly
easily what it is we are trying to support with the metadata in the UKCMF.
Having identified our functional requirements we can then look at the
metadata elements that we need to support those requirements. If we take
a look at the current list of mandatory elements in the proposed UKCMF we
see
- identifier
- title
- language
- description
- publisher
- format
- locator
- copyright
(apologies if I missed something). I suggest that these elements do not
support the functional requirements above. Consequently, I think we also
need to add
- general.keywords
- educational.context
- author
- learningresourcetype
- otherplatformrequirements (or 4.4.requirement)
as mandatory elements. Then we can support all the MUST functionality
outlined above. By also adding
- classification
we can also support the HIGHLY DESIRABLE functionality (provided we can
agree a way of using subject classification schemes!).
Hope this helps.
One interesting feature of the list of elements above is that all of them
apart from educational.context and otherplatformrequirements map directly
to DC elements - this is very good news I think, and makes
interoperability between 'elearning' systems and 'information' systems
much more straight-forward.
Regards,
Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933
Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
|