Hi all,
Agree with Andy.
Sorry, I know you're not supposed to send "I agree" comments to lists
but I thought this was a particularly good one! :-)
Sarah
Andy Powell wrote:
>
> 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/
--
*******************************************
Ms. Sarah Currier
Coordinator / Research Fellow
Educational Content Special Interest Group (EC-SIG)
CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards)
Rm. 2.08B, Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde
Graham Hills Building, 50 George Street
Glasgow G1 1QE, Scotland, United Kingdom
Tel.: +44 (0)141 548 4573 Fax: +44 (0)141 553 2053
E-mail: [log in to unmask] Mob.: +44 (0)7980 855 801
Web (EC-SIG): http://www.cetis.ac.uk/educational-content/
Web (Dept.): http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/CAP/
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