Hi Andy,

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your "outrageous pre-christmas
posting".  And fwiw I think you're being very restrained limiting yourself to
one a year, some folk have one a week! ;-)

I have to say that having spent more time that is probably good for one's sanity
with the LOM, I'm inclined to agree with you that bits of it are a mess and lots
of it never gets used.   And yes, in the future DC probably will be the way to
go.  Having said that, for all it's flaws LOM is a proper grown up (well maybe a
sulky adolescent) standard and as long as people are using even a few bits of
it then it's the duty of us poor souls to help provide them with some guidance.
 Hence the UK LOM Core.

And while we're on the subject of crazy metadata standards I was amused by a
mail that Phil sent me recently which seemed to suggest that "while MARC has
nearly 2000 fields/subfields, a preliminary study of 400K records showed that
half of these were not used, and 36 fields accounted for 80% of all use."
Still, that's no excuse for some of the silliness found in LOM.....

I'll look forward to more outrageous and off-message postings from you, and the
rest of the SIG, throughout the year :-)

All the best
Lorna

PS And another thing..... what on earth would we do with all the spare time we'd
have if all metadata standards worked perfectly and sensibly?  We'd have to go
out and get a life or something...... ;-)


On 23 Dec 2004, at 09:44, Andy Powell wrote:

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004, Lorna Campbell wrote:

One other outstanding issue that we need to address relates to the UKEC
vocabulary which does not conform to the LOM as it duplicates a term
(higher education) from the existing LOM vocabulary.  Phil and I have
discussed this issue at length but have not come up with a
satisfactory resolution yet.

[This is my "outrageous pre-christmas posting"... I think everyone should
be allowed one of these per year!?]

Good grief... the more I look at LOM the more I think it is a mess!

Isn't it about time to throw it away and move to DC-Education instead?

All the evidence that I've seen seems to indicate that the only bits of
LOM that get used are those bits already covered by DC-Education.  But
with DC you get a highly extensible underlying model [1], a choice of
syntaxes [2] and a globally unique approach to identifying terms in the
metadata using URIs [3].  So the kind of nonesense above simply does not
arise - well, not often! :-)

[Sorry, I'll be back on-message in the new year.]

Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell
tel: +44 1225 383933 skype: andy.powell msn: [log in to unmask]
Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/

[1] http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/
[2] http://dublincore.org/resources/expressions/
[3] http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-namespace/



--
Lorna M. Campbell
Assistant Director, CETIS
University of Strathclyde
+44 (0)141 548 3072
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/





--
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/