> ----------
> From:         John Casey {DAICE}
> Sent:         Monday, July 12, 2004 15:45 PM
> To:   'Fred Riley'
> Subject:      RE: UK LOM Core: mandatory elements
>
> Fred, Andy. Yes this is a timely topic and Andy's points are really
> thought provoking about the future and Fred's observations are spot on as
> I am about to start running a repository in a new job and have the same
> concerns about the amount of data to fill in. Some quick observations:
>
> Learning Objects and their metadata have an implicit world view that they
> are worth taking the time to make granular and create rich metadata
> records for, such as in the aviation industry and the military CBT
> training. In this world view it follows that the resources (people, money,
> training, management buy-in) are made available to do this because it
> makes sense from the top down - Unfortunately this activity is probably
> going to be poorly understood in our institutions and poorly  funded which
> kind of contradicts the rationale of learning objects, their metadata and
> reuse. If this analysis is kind of right this leaves us with a problem and
> one obvious way of alleviating it is to make larger learning objects to
> reduce the metadata load.
>
> Now this flies in the face of the notion of highly granular learning
> objects but for some of us the trade off in having larger learning objects
> might be worth while. There was one post to this list a while back that
> said their institution was using quite large learning objects - I can't
> remember who it was from ( I think it was a medical school) but I would
> like to hear more about people's experience in that area.
>
> Andy's ideas for a kind of distributed metadata record (I hope I have got
> that right) has a lot of attraction (especially the idea about the
> annotations service which we are interested in here) but I think for the
> people running large repositories like JORUM etc they will require the
> 'full monty' of metadata at the time of deposit because it is always
> difficult to put metadata right afterwards and they will veer to the side
> of caution.
>
> All the Best
> John
>
> John Casey
> Project Officer
> Learning to Learn  - an X4L Project
> DAICE
> Airthrey Castle
> University of Stirling
> Stirling
> FK9 4LA
> Tel: +44 (0)1786 467943
> Mobile: 07944286794
> email: [log in to unmask]
> web: http://www.stir.ac.uk/departments/daice/l2l/
>
> ----------
> From:         Fred Riley
> Reply To:     Fred Riley
> Sent:         Monday, July 12, 2004 11:39 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      UK LOM Core: mandatory elements
>
> Interesting post, Andy. I'd tend to agree with your points, although I
> hasten to add that I'm a metadata neophyte, coming from a
> web/database/e-learning techie background. I'll shortly have to make a
> start on creating a learning object repository, which will almost
> certainly use the UKLOM Core or parts thereof. I've skimmed through
> version 0.2 and the amount of detail required is frightening, although I
> can see the importance of most of the elements and wouldn't want to see
> any dropped. I do worry, though, about how and who we're going to get to
> fill in all this data for each LO, and the number of mandatory elements is
> also a concern (hell, I don't even understand some of them, but that's
> probably because I'm a programmer not a librarian).
>
> I can also see that sometimes a seemingly obvious mandatory element can't
> be filled out. For instance, I remember Niall Sclater in Strathclyde
> writing about how the 'title' element of the Question Test
> Interoperability spec can be difficult to fill in for a particular
> question - what do you call yet another multiple-choice question? I think
> he wrote that sometimes he had to fill this with a standard default
> string. He wasn't moaning, as he figured the occasional 'clunky' element
> value was a price worth paying for a decent schema, but it does go to show
> that what can seem to be an easy field to fill in sometimes isn't.
>
> From my limited database design experience, I'm aware that users often run
> into problems filling in mandatory fields, but then I'm also aware that
> when I made fields optional either users didn't fill them in or just left
> in defaults which left considerable gaps in some records.
>
> I'm not drawing any conclusions here as I don't really have the expertise
> to do so, I just thought I'd throw in my 2 Euro's worth seeing as you
> wanted comments.
>
> Cheers
>
> Fred
>
> Fred Riley
> Learning Technologist
> Room C57
> School of Nursing
> University of Nottingham
> Queen's Medical Centre
> Nottingham
> NG7 2HA
>
> Tel: +44 (0)115 92 49924 ext 37180
> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
> >>> Andy Powell <[log in to unmask]> 09/07/2004 16:32:40 >>>
> 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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