Firstly, this kind of collective thinking out loud is very helpful (to me at least) because I think it helps us understand better how difficult (and important) the modelling stage of building an application profile.
Some more thoughts (these are no more than thoughts at this stage):
1) I agree with whoever said (Diane?) that we need to better understand the functional requirements we are working to. At this stage, I feel like I am modelling in the abstract because I don't fully understand what functional requirements we are aiming at - this is not a good thing! If I had to guess, I'd say that the high-level functional requirement is to:
- support the discovery of learning resources and activities in order to help meet people's teaching and learning aims
(Apologies... I'm sure this is written down somewhere - I just haven't looked hard enough!). However, even if this is in the right ball-park it is nowhere near specific enough so needs some refinement.
2) Stuart, I agree with pretty much everything you say below.
3) When we model a view of the world as part of an application profile, we don't necessarily need to describe every entity in the model. Some things may be in the model just to help us understand it. If we pretend things don't exist or explicitly leave entities out because we know we don't want to describe them, we may end up introducing confusion downstream. (For example, a library AP may decide to model works, expressions, manifestations and items but only choose to describe items).
4) Our model needs to be both correct and just complex enough to support our stated functional requirements but no more so - hence the importance of 1) above. As I said before, there are lots of ways to model the world - deciding which model is most useful in any given context is not easy.
5) In the context of this AP, there are 'ConceptualEducationalActivities' (roughly equivalent to FRBR works although I strongly suspect that FRBR isn't helpful to us here), 'EducationalActivityInstances' (i.e. temporally-defined events when someone puts the ConceptualEducationalActivity into practice), various kinds of 'EducationalActivityDocumentation' about those two things (both prescriptive (a lesson plan for a ConceptualEducationalActivity) and descriptive (a video recording of an EducationalActivityInstance)), other 'Resources' that are utilized as part of those activities. And there are 'Agents' (the people and organization that are related to those things). These are our basic building blocks I think - at least in the model of this world that I currently have in my head. I agree with you (Stuart), that to support our current functional requirements it may only be necessary (and indeed sensible) to describe EducationalActivityDocumentation, Resources and Agents.
6) If I'm anywhere near the right track here (and I may well not be) then one modelling question for us is whether documentation about conceptual activities and documentation about instances of activities can be modelled using a single entity or whether these things are different enough that they should be modelled separately. In part that may come down to a refinement of our functional requirements.
Hope this helps (it's probably my last contribution to this discussion pre-Christmas, so have a good break everyone).
Andy
________________________________
Andy Powell
Research Programme Director
Eduserv
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stuart Sutton [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 23 December 2009 18:20
> To: Andy Powell; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: RE: DC-Ed Application Profile: Defining resource classes for
> the AP
>
> Yes, Andy, I think I see where you are coming from. I think we may not
> be as 'close' as I had thought. Andy, it seems to me that we are at
> best faced in this AP with 'description' of activity/process since
> actual activities are temporally bound and natively ephemeral unless
> somehow documented. Thus, it is only through description that
> activities of concern are known to us beyond the immediate experience
> of the activity and that documentation is subject to what you refer to
> as 'document' relationships. So, I'd posit, that not only MIGHT an
> EducationalActivity "have an associated documentation", that associated
> documentation is quite routine in this domain and is of primary concern
> to the AP because it is through that documentation that the activities
> described are made manifest in a form that can be communicated and
> used. For example, look at the TeachEngineering educational resource
> at [1]. This resource consists of what TeachEngineering denotes as
> 'lesson' and two related 'activities' [2]-[3]. Descriptions
> (representations) of the three components are what what we see when we
> resolve the URL and what I describe when I create metadata for use. I
> am admittedly and unabashedly describing this "associated
> documentation" developed by TeachEngineering as my primary object. So,
> we have "activity" and the documentary means by which that activity is
> usefully known. Are these different things? Yes. Can I have an
> activity (that is either being conceived or occurred at some time in
> the past) that is useful in the context of the DC-Ed AP without that
> documentary manifestation? Hard for me to conceive?
>
> Stuart
>
> [1] "The Air We Breathe " http://tinyurl.com/yz6cnxe
> [2] "I Breathe WHAT??" http://tinyurl.com/ygu8kr4
> [3] "Cleaning the Air" http://tinyurl.com/yf3moqf
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Powell [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 8:21 AM
> To: Stuart Sutton; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: RE: DC-Ed Application Profile: Defining resource classes for
> the AP
>
> The basic picture looks fine.
>
> However, an EducationalActivity is an activity (a process?) rather than
> a document so the properties dcterms:hasFormat and dcterms:isFormatOf
> don't make sense to me.
>
> I was going to make the same comment about dcterms:publisher but I
> suppose that an activity can have an "entity responsible for making the
> [activity] available"??
>
> An EducationalActivity might have some associated documentation, a
> LessonPlan for example, which would have properties like
> dcterms:publisher and dcterms:hasFormat/isFormatOf. Further, the
> relationship between an EducationalActivity and a LessonPlan could be
> dcterms:description (though I suspect that there might be some push-
> back against that kind of use of dcterms:description).
>
> Also, if you are intending 'source' in the diagram to be dcterms:source
> then I'm not sure that I agree. I think the relationship between an
> EducationalActivity and a Resource is more like 'makesUseOf' or
> 'utilizes'. I'm not sure that the activity is always directly 'derived
> from' the resource itself (as would be implied by the use of
> dcterms:source)? I'm not sure?
>
> Andy
>
> ________________________________
>
> Andy Powell
> Research Programme Director
> Eduserv
>
> [log in to unmask]
> 01225 474319 / 07989 476710
> www.eduserv.org.uk
> efoundations.typepad.com
> twitter.com/andypowe11
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Stuart Sutton [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> > Sent: 23 December 2009 13:58
> > To: Andy Powell; [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: RE: DC-Ed Application Profile: Defining resource classes for
> > the AP
> >
> > Andy, would you mind taking a look at the attached skeletal model and
> > tell me whether it somewhat represents what you are saying? If not,
> > how's it off base? The rdfs:resource node outside the descriptive
> > domain represents everything that is not educational activity.
> >
> > Stuart
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: DCMI Education Community [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> On
> > Behalf Of Andy Powell
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 3:02 AM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: DC-Ed Application Profile: Defining resource classes for
> > the AP
> >
> > > 1) "The DC-Education Application Profile (DC-Ed AP) is intended to
> > > describe a precise category of "things in the world"--those things
> > > that have been deliberately purposed (or re-purposed) for use in
> the
> > > processes of formal and informal teaching and learning."
> >
> > I agree that this is a good starting definition.
> >
> > I have a slight concern about the wording of 'purposed for use' (and
> > 're-purposed') because that phrase carries connotations of
> > 'modification' (i.e. the resource being changed in order to
> facilitate
> > its use in teaching and learning) for me.
> >
> > I wonder why we don't just say 'used' (and 're-used') as follows:
> >
> > 1) "The DC-Education Application Profile (DC-Ed AP) is intended to
> > describe a precise category of "things in the world"--those things
> that
> > have been deliberately used (or re-used) in the processes of formal
> and
> > informal teaching and learning."
> >
> > ?
> >
> > Given that definition, there is then the question of how best to
> model
> > that set of 'things in the world'.
> >
> > Stuart proposes a model in which the set of things in the world of
> > interest to us are assigned a new class of LearningResource.
> >
> > I suggest an alternative, which is that we model the set of things in
> > the world of interest to us as being the set of things of class
> > rdfs:Resource which have an associated EducationalUsage.
> >
> > In short, I don't think Stuart and I disagree (significantly) about
> the
> > set of things of interest to this application profile. We only
> > disagree on how best to model that set of things.
> >
> > Stuart's model is simpler (which is undoubtedly a good thing).
> >
> > My model is more complex.
> >
> > Stuart's model will (presumably) result in the things of interest
> being
> > assigned new properties by virtue of them being treated as
> > LearningResources. (Stuart, is that what you intend?)
> >
> > My model only assigns new properties to things of the class
> > EducationalUsage. (In fact, with my model the application profile
> > essentially becomes one for describing the educational use of
> > resources, not for describing the resources themselves.)
> >
> > I think my model better describes what is actually happening in the
> > world - a resource doesn't suddenly get a new set of properties just
> > because someone decides to use it in a particular way. However, I
> also
> > think the additional complexity is something to be very wary of.
> >
> > (To repeat an earlier point) if we take Jon's example of "a textbook
> is
> > always a textbook"... well yes, it is. But that textbook may have
> very
> > different levels of difficulty when used as part of an English
> > literature course than it does when used as part of a library
> > cataloguing course. In Stuart's 'properties of the LearningResource
> > model', two separate global assertions that the textbook is both
> 'very
> > difficult' and 'very easy' (to be somewhat crass about it!) made by
> two
> > separate people in two separate contexts will only be able to be
> > unpicked (by software) by some sort of provenance (who said what?)
> > approach which may make Stuart's model much more complex.
> >
> > To sum up... there is more than one way of modelling the world (I
> guess
> > we all knew that!). In this case, I don't know which is the best
> model
> > (and, in fact, I'm not even sure I understand how to begin to judge
> > which might be the best model :-( ).
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > Andy Powell
> > Research Programme Director
> > Eduserv
> >
> > [log in to unmask]
> > 01225 474319 / 07989 476710
> > www.eduserv.org.uk
> > efoundations.typepad.com
> > twitter.com/andypowe11
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: DCMI Education Community [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> > On
> > > Behalf Of Flack, Irvin
> > > Sent: 22 December 2009 02:31
> > > To: [log in to unmask]
> > > Subject: Re: DC-Ed Application Profile: Defining resource classes
> for
> > > the AP
> > >
> > > Stuart
> > >
> > > I completely agree with what you just said, so I've been
> > > misinterpreting the definitions on the wiki.
> > >
> > > On that point, there seem to actually be three slightly different
> > > definitions at the moment[1]:
> > >
> > > In the Background:
> > >
> > > 1) "The DC-Education Application Profile (DC-Ed AP) is intended to
> > > describe a precise category of "things in the world"--those things
> > > that have been deliberately purposed (or re-purposed) for use in
> the
> > > processes of formal and informal teaching and learning."
> > >
> > > and
> > >
> > > 2) "The intention is to define the resource class narrowly as
> > > comprised of resources intentionally designed with the purpose of
> > > achieving or measuring definable learning objectives for a
> prescribed
> > audience."
> > >
> > > and in the DC-Ed Resource Classes table:
> > >
> > > 3) "Learning resource: A resource with the intentional purpose of
> > > achieving or measuring one or more defined learning goals."
> > >
> > > The first one best captures my idea of a learning resource,
> provided
> > > 're-purposed' includes the scenario of my Creative Arts teacher
> > > identifying the utility of the website for her art students. The
> > > second one I like least because of the inclusion of 'design', which
> > to
> > > me is hard to assess.
> > >
> > > Irvin
> > >
> > > [1] http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/Classes
> > >
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Stuart Sutton [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> > > Sent: Tuesday, 22 December 2009 12:31 PM
> > > To: Flack, Irvin; [log in to unmask]
> > > Subject: RE: DC-Ed Application Profile: Defining resource classes
> for
> > > the AP
> > >
> > > Irwin, I'd only add one thing. In the end, the DC-Ed AP is about
> > > resource _description_ for a particular domain--that is what we are
> > > trying to enable. So, I would say that once your Creative Arts
> > > teacher identifies the resource's utility in secondary arts student
> > > learning we have a learning resource and once you get to describing
> > > it, your description is of that resource as a learning resource.
> > > Barring education domain knowledge of your own or your creative
> arts
> > > teacher friend's input, you'd have describe that resource as
> whatever
> > > you deem it to be natively. That's why I continue to assert that
> you
> > > are describing that resource as a learning resource and not as some
> > > other class of thing encompassed by rdfs:Resource--i.e., anything
> > > whatsoever we can think of and describe. Out of that totally
> > > encompassing universe, you and your creative arts teacher friend
> have
> > > carved out something specialized--an instance of the class learning
> > > resource.
> > >
> > > Stuart
> > >
> > >
> >
> **********************************************************************
> > > This message is intended for the addressee named and may contain
> > > privileged information or confidential information or both. If you
> > are
> > > not the intended recipient please delete it and notify the sender.
> > >
> >
> **********************************************************************
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