I've just finished looking at metadata for lots of learning objects.
Some pragmatic observations about the mandatories no doubt made before
but re-inforced to me at least -
- There's a lot of them isn't there - falling asleep just doing the top
level stuff.
- er... what do they mean?
Adrian
_________________________________
Adrian Stevenson
Software Developer
JORUM Project, MIMAS
Manchester Computing
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
Tel: +44(0)161 275 7044
Email: [log in to unmask]
MIMAS: http://www.mimas.ac.uk
JORUM: http://www.jorum.ac.uk
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The CETIS Metadata Special Interest Group
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andy Powell
> Sent: 09 July 2004 16:33
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: UK LOM Core: mandatory elements
>
>
> My feeling is that UK LOM Core has a major problem with the way it
> mandates so many elements.
>
> I think this desire to mandate elements comes from a world view which
> assumes that metadata is always passed around in discrete and complete
> chunks called records - and that therefore it is always
> possible to say
> whether any particular chunk meets some rules that determine
> whether it is
> valid as a record or not.
>
> More open views, like that of RDF for example, don't take such a fixed
> view about whether something is a 'record' or not. They take the view
> that sets of metadata properties (elements) can be pulled
> together from
> anywhere and combined in various ways to meet a particular need.
> Therefore, the notion of something being mandatory or not
> simply doesn't
> arise - if you are missing an element it may just be because
> you haven't
> yet found the bit of metadata that provides that information yet.
>
> Consider the following scenario...
>
> 1) An RDN hub provides the core descriptiove elements about a resource
> (title, description, subject keywords, etc.).
>
> 2) An LTSN centre provides some e-learning metadata about the same
> resource (level, semantic density, learning time, etc.).
>
> 3) A third-party service allows end-users to provide
> annotations about the
> same resource.
>
> Each of these services makes their metadata available using
> the LOM XML
> binding. Each follows the cataloguing guidelines in the UK
> LOM Core for
> the elements that they control.
>
> Taken together, the three parts provide a full, UK LOM Core compliant
> record. But individually, the metadata exposed by each service is not
> compliant because it doesn't contain the full set of
> mandatory elements.
>
> I think that it would be more helpful to allow these services to claim
> compliance with the UK LOM Core, even though they each only contain
> partial information. It somehow feels wrong, or at least I don't
> understand what we achieve, by saying that the individual
> services are not
> complient.
>
> The other argument against making so many elements mandatory
> is that for
> all elements (with the possible exceptions of the
> identifiers) there will
> be some scenarios in which the element has no valid value.
> In such cases,
> the only course of action is to provide the element with a
> null value? I
> assume that a null value is legal(?) but doing this seems, to me, to
> completely undermine what is being attempted by trying to mandate
> particular elements. Why is an empty value OK but a missing
> element is
> not?
>
> In conclusion, I think that the only elements in UK LOM Core that are
> mandatory should be
>
> 1.1 general.identifier
>
> and
>
> 3.1 metaMetadata.identifier
>
> and even those I'd be prepared to be argued out of! Everything else
> should be highly desirable, desirable or optional. This would allow
> applications to make sensible decisions about which elements
> they expose
> or not.
>
> In summary, conformance with UK LOM Core should tell you more
> about how
> particular elements and values have been used than about which set of
> elements to expect in a record.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> 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/
> ECDL 2004, Bath, UK - 12-17 Sept 2004 - http://www.ecdl2004.org/
>
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