Dear all,
I've finally had a chance to read through all your comments on the
UKCMF. I collated all your mail into a single document which now runs
to 28 pages and I haven't even started on the accessibility metadata
discussions yet! A lot of the issues raised when the UKCMF was
initially published have already been addressed by Phil, Gerry and other
list members so I'd just like to pick up on a couple of points.
-- Discipline Classification --
First of all the discussion regarding discipline classification was
fascinating. Thanks very much to Aida for providing such in depth
information about classification in general and Dewey in particular.
Very helpful. As Gerry and Phil pointed out the rational behind
recommending the use of Dewey for the X4L Programme was to ensure that
all the resources produced have at least one classification from a
common scheme. All projects are free to use additional classification
schemes of course. If the projects really, really object to the use of
Dewey, or we can't get the licensing issue sorted out, then we will have
to consider recommending an alternative mandatory classification scheme.
That would probably mean a combination of the Learn Direct
classification and JACS, although this may well be even more difficult
to deal with than Dewey
-- Identifiers --
Andy Powell raised some very valid issues about the use of identifiers.
I have to confess that I am slightly out of my depth here. Identifiers
aren't really my specialised subject. However it's clear we need to
discuss this issue further and would be happy to follow the
recommendations of those who are more knowledgeable.
-- Educational Context and Level --
As Gerry pointed out, element 5.6 educational.context describes "the
principal environment within which the learning and use of this learning
object is intended to take place" In order to provide more detailed
information about the educational level a classification should be used
to describe 9.1 classification.purpose.educatioanl level. In the UKCMF
we recommend the use of the SCQF which acts as a common spine against
which other qualification frameworks can be mapped. See Appendix 2 for
this mapping.
-- Author and Title --
I thought Aida's suggestion that author and title fields are of little
practical use was very interesting although to some extent this is a
theoretical argument, obviously we need to include these fields in a
common application profile. Having said that, I have frequently come
across users who have repeatedly said that the only metadata they are
interested in, in terms of resource discovery, is title, author and who
used the resource in what context. This raises all sorts of other
thorny issues about "secondary usage metadata" and the necessity of the
other 66 LOM elements which I won't go into here, we'll save that one
for later!!
-- Mandatory --
There has been some discussion over what exactly "mandatory" means. This
issue was raised at a Jorum+ project meeting on Monday. We all agreed
that mandatory means mandatory. In the context of X4L, the strand B
tools projects will be encouraged to implement the whole of the LOM but
will also present users with the option of filling in only the UKCMF
elements, many of which will be generated automatically by the Jorum
Development bay. If projects are storing their learning objects in
their own databases we would still recommend that the implement all the
mandatory fields plus any additional LOM fields that they may feel are
relevant to their own project's requirements.
-- Rights Fields --
Ed Barker asked whether or not the rights fields should be mandatory as
people may have difficulty finding out whether the resources they are
using are subject to copyright restrictions. I would suggest that if
developers are not clear about the copyright of the resources they are
using, they should definitely not be sharing them for use by the wider
community. This is a fundamental digital rights management issue so the
rights fields must remain mandatory. Having said all that, the
vocabularies for the rights fields are fairly minimal (yes, no,
description) so there is some scope for fuzziness.
-- Ed Barker's Comments --
Ed has clearly given the UKCMF a great deal of thought and his RDN case
study example is very useful, so thanks Ed. However some of his comments
stem from a slight confusion as to exactly who will be using and
implementing the UKCMF in the context of the X4L programme. First of
all we need to distinguish between implementors and users.
"Implementors" are those who will actually be creating an application
using the Framework e.g. Jorum+, Reload, database developers, portal
managers (?). I would expect most "users" to use one or more of these
applications to create metadata records to describe resources they have
created or repurposed. It will be the responsibility of the implementors
to automate much of the process and make the creation of the metadata as
simple as possible. For example mime types could either be generated
automatically or selected from a drop down list. Ed also mentions that
the smallest permitted maximum issue might confuse users. Smallest
permitted maximum guidelines are for implementors only, users need never
know they apply, unless they have an odd fetish for creating millions of
m/d records! Ed also suggested pruning some of the LOM vocabularies of
some of their less useful terms e.g."terminator". I am seriously
reluctant to start mucking around with the LOM vocabularies even though
some of them are rather suspect (I totally agree with Aida's comment
that the learningresourcetype vocabulary is a horrible mess). In the
interests of interoperability we have tried to minimise changes to
controlled vocabularies. The only one we have changed is
learningcontext (see earlier discussions). If users are unfamiliar
with some of the more obscure LOM terms they always have the option of
ignoring them or, if they're really keen, they can consult user guides
or the Metadata SIG.
Thank you all again for all the issues you've raised. We really
appreciate your comments as it's only through your input that we can
ensure that the UKCMF really does meet the requirements of all users and
implementors.
All the best
Lorna
--
Lorna M. Campbell
Assistant Director
Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS)
Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde
+44 (0)141 548 3072
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/
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