Hi Ben,
> 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.
Thanks for this analogy Ben. I think you've provided us with a useful reality
/ sanity check.
> 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.
Indeed, one of the primary aims of the UK LOM Core was to help implementers
who were baffled as to which LOM elements to use.
> 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.
That's a very public spirited perspective! :-)
> 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?
Not if you're a teaching looking for resources.
Bye
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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