*UK LOM Core, what is it for (summary)*
The following is a summary of discussion on the CETIS-Metadata list, and
will hopefully serve as the agreed starting point for further discussion at
the UK LOM Core meeting in Glasgow. The archives of the original discussion
can be found at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cetis-metadata.html (the
discussion took place in July).
*Position in UK LOM Core draft 2*
From the Overview section: (p3)
"[the UK LOM Core stems from work which resulted in] a set of guidelines
... drafted to inform UK practitioners on the implementation of a minimum
common core of LOM elements and associated value spaces."
"The aim of the UK LOM Core is to identify common practice and provide
guidelines for metadata implementers, creators and users."
*Issue Description*
It is important to be clear about the aims of the UK LOM Core since this
will affect decisions made about most of the other issues, notably the
issue concerning the number of mandatory elements.
Gerry Graham wrote:
"I feel the original intention of the UK LOM Core is being lost somewhere ...
"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...
"It is not that the UK LOM Core is trying to be everything, more that many
people are trying to [do] everything with it.
"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."
Phil Barker wrote:
"If [UK LOM Core] 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[d])."
Lorna Campbell wrote:
"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 :-)"
[About the origin of the UK LOM Core] "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 ... At the same time if two applications ... 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."
Lorna also wrote:
"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."
*Routes to Resolution?*
Gathering use cases has been suggested by a number of people. [Personally,
I'm not sure we're going to do that in time for the meeting on the 17th!]
Perhaps we should try to agree three or four clear, simple "aims"
statements on the 17th?
Other suggestions?
Phil.
--
Phil Barker Learning Technology Adviser
ICBL, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Mountbatten Building, Heriot-Watt University,
Edinburgh, EH14 4AS
Tel: 0131 451 3278 Fax: 0131 451 3327
Web: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/
|