All,
        I think that Gerry makes a number of useful points.

        As with any effort to promote an agreed way of transfering
information between parties there will be areas where the agreed way
does not fit with a particular senario. This in itself does not negate
the need for an agreement. The SGML/XML world of document publishing has
been around for 25+ years and has addressed the issue of
partial/incomplete documents that occur in any production/publication
workflow. The outcomes of this were many systems that allow for a
document to progress through its lifecycle until it reaches an agreed
state at which point the document could claim to be comformant to an
agreed specification/standard. What that document is before it reaches
that point is generally accepted to be the responsibility of the system
that produces it, because in most cases the document is not exposed
externally. Where that document is exposed externally before it reaches
complince to an agreed state is dealt with by having levels of
conformance similar to the ideas proposed recently.
        If we proceed on the basis that there are too many mandatory
elements in UK LOM CORE we will end up with a consensus that is the same
as IEEE LOM and not really have achieved anything.
        Although having mandatory elements will be a burden on many
people and systems it is a burden that is worth shouldering as it will
advance and enrich the community by providing a minimum level of
information that everone can rely on, though I do acknowledge that the
quality of information may be variable, however this is not the purpose
of the UK LOM CORE.
        Without an agreed set of mandatory elements we will not raise
the level and will sending IMHO the wrong message to the community.

        In closing, <lom xmlns="http://ltsc.ieee.org/xsd/LOM"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://ltsc.ieee.org/xsd/lomv1.0/lom.xsd"></lom>
valid, but useful?

Regards,
        Ben

---------------------------------
Dr Ben Ryan
HLSI Software Development Manager
University of Huddersfield
Tel: 01484 473587
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
---------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Gerry Graham [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 16 July 2004 13:39
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: UK LOM Core: what is it for (was Re: UK LOM Core: mandatory
e lements)


Hi all

I know I've been absent for a while on this list but I have been kept
properly engaged and active on stuff, in case anyone thinks I was off on
an extended holiday or something!

In moral support of Lorna and in defence of UK LOM Core I thought I'd
add in my two pence worth.

I feel the original intention of the UK LOM Core is being lost somewhere
in the discussion, perhaps the number of mandatory elements is too many
but to argue as little as two is to miss the point of it in the first
place.

The initial need was identified to allow the players in the UK education
arena to be able to meaningfully exchange information about learning
resources across all the sectors involved. Remember this includes HE in
England through to (in theory) nurseries in Northern Ireland and
anything in between. One intention was to agree on some vocabularies
that we could in theory all use (I stress in theory as remember this was
part of a master plan but a reaction to a perceived problem from
individuals who happened to have a few spare hours).

The mandated information was thought of a 'record' in the sense that it
would meet the needs of an learning resource information seeker who
isn't necessarily a learner btw. Not all the information contained would
also have to be exchanged or exposed in all circumstances of course. And
not all atomic things requiring metadata would need all mandatory parts
of the UK LOM Core completed. It was only really concerned with learning
resources, not necessarily for an individual question that may one day
be contained in a learning resource or assessment instrument.

It is not that the UK LOM Core is trying to be everything, more that
many people are trying to everything with it.

It may be helpful to see UK LOM Core as a collection of different parts.
The mandatory elements can stand apart from the recommended vocabularies
and from the cataloguing guidance for a UK context accompanying all the
elements. If this was the case the question of the mandatory elements
only comes into question when you consider the needs of an learning
resource information seeker. I would still argue that a statement
outlining what the user is allowed to do with a learning resource
encapsulated in a Rights elements is necessary and therefore a candidate
for being mandatory.

So in summary, lets be clear why it exists, what aspects of it are
valuable on their own, what other things do people actually need and how
are these met. And remember, the 'people' concerned are all those
engaged at whatever level in UK education.

Perhaps we need to think [use cases] of different sets of
mandatory/recommended elements for different purposes all using the same
localised LOM vocabularies and cataloguing guidance.

Cheers

Gerry ;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Lorna M. Campbell [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 16 July 2004 13:08
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: UK LOM Core: what is it for (was Re: UK LOM Core: mandatory
elements)


Hi there,

How come you guys always answer one question with another question??!

Ok, what's it for?  I said that the aim of UK LOM Core was to facilitate
basic interoperability but as Phil pointed out if that was simply the
case we could just point to CanCore :-)

Scott said:
>Of course, is this a minimal set that should be supported as a search 
>index for interoperable search? Or is it disconnected from search 
>functions, and is about usage hints to a delivery process? Or is it 
>both, everything, or nothing??

I think part of the problem is that the UK LOM Core is trying to be
everything :-}  I also think the fact that the core  started out as a
rather ad hoc development is starting to tell.  We started of by
assessing common practice and then created a profile on the basis of
this common practice. What we didn't do was formally gather requirements
and use cases.  Use cases might help us to answer some of the questions
we're struggling with now.

When Gerry and I wrote the first draft of the profile is was based on a
comparison of about a dozen existing profiles, including SCORM, which
Scot mentioned.  We wanted to see if there was any commonality in the
elements that other profiles used and, if so, to recommend the use of
these elements to the UK educational community.  The type of scenario we
had in mind was that a teacher searching any  repository would know that
there would always be a minimum set of factors that they can search for
(title, contributor, language, rights). At the same time if two
applications (e.g. a local repository and a national hub) are exchanging
metadata instances then there will be a common set of elements that each
application will recognise regardless of extensions, customised elements
& vocabularies etc. We also wanted to ensure that all of the recently
funded X4L project would use a common set of elements.

This doesn't really answer the questions raised by Phil and Scott but
hopefully it'll help clarify the origins of the profile.  Where do we go
from here though??

Bye
Lorna

On 16 Jul 2004, at 12:31, Phil Barker wrote:

Lorna M. Campbell wrote:


> If we were to keep a mandatory element set, ideally what should this 
> core consist of?
>
That depends what the UK LOM Core is for! If it aims to promote
interoperability, then it is enough for it to work on an
element-by-element level providing definitions and vocabularies suitable
for UK use. It'll be a small document I guess, saying use CanCore with
these changes.

If it aims to promote the creation/supply of enough metadata to satisfy
the needs of Learning Resource users, then I think the current core
might be justified. (Although we need to make sure that we don't limit
the way the metadata creation process is managed in such a way that
inhibits practices aimed at improving the quality of the metadata
produce).

It's because I believe there needs to be a broader aim than just
swapping bits of metadata (a metadatum anyone?) that I think that the
WAI model is worth considering (and perhaps rejecting).

Phil


--
Phil Barker                            Learning Technology Adviser
      ICBL, School of Mathematics and Computer Science
      Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS
      Tel: work - 0131 451 3278    home - 0131 221 1352
      Web: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/

--
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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