Some time ago I gave a presentation to the Higher Education Academy
technical folks, trying to summarise the state of play with various
metadata and resource discovery activities. The presentation is
available from
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/publications/hea-feb06/
I started with the 'formal', discussing where we have got to with
RLLOMAP and the UK LOM Core and suggesting that these things need to be
alingned and combined in some way. I then touched on the work of the
DCMI/IEEE LTSC taskforce, which is looking to align DC metadata and LOM
around a single shared underlying model. I also noted the ongoing (and
somewhat slow) evolution of UKEL, the list of UK Educational Levels.
(Since my presentation there has also been a bit of off-list discussion
about how the list of 'learning object types' used in RLLOMAP can be
updated).
I then went on to discuss the more 'informal' (social) approaches to
resource discovery - del.icio.us, flickr, Connotea and the like.
Two things struck me... firstly, that the simple vocabularies that we
have been developing in activities like RLLOMAP share a lot of
similarities with folksonomies (at least insofar that they are
"collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system that enable
Internet users to categorize content such as Web pages, online
photographs, and Web links" to take the definition in Wikipedia) and
secondly that they potentially form the basis for a useful set of 'tags'
in social bookmarking systems like those mentioned above (e.g. we could
effectively all agree to use the tag 'ukel5' or whatever?).
It occurred to me that it is these 'lomtologies' (LOM-based
folksonomies) that potentially form the glue between formal matedata
systems like DC and LOM and the more informal, lightweight tagging
approaches to resource discovery ?
Andy
--
Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
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