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Hi all, Agree with Andy. Sorry, I know you're not supposed to send "I agree" comments to lists but I thought this was a particularly good one! :-) Sarah Andy Powell wrote: > > The UKCMF document is a really useful piece of work and helps to focus > thinking on which bits of LOM are important to us. I have sent some > specific comments on the text of the document to Gerry and Lorna > separately. What follows is some discussion about the general aims behind > developing a UKCMF - i.e. what are we trying to achieve with this? I'm > sending this more widely because I think it is important to have a shared > understanding of why this work is important and what it will be used to > support. Comments on (and rejections of) this message are very welcome! > > This work seems to have taken the approach of looking at what other people > have already defined as their 'application profiles' of LOM and trying to > extrapolate from that a view of the most commonly used elements. > Apologies to the authors if this seriously misrepresents the work they > have done. I can understand the rationale behind this approach - but it > is premised on the notion that other people will have the same functional > requirements as we do, and that therefore their choices of elements in the > application profile will be the same as ours? > > An 'alternative' approach would be to enumerate our own functional > requirements (what kinds of services do we want to deliver based on this > metadata), then use that as the basis for deciding what elements we need. > Finally, we could compare our results with what other people have come up > with and deal with any obvious anomalies. > > I think our functional requirements can be stated very briefly, as follows: > > We MUST be able to support: > - keyword searches (based on title, description and keywords in the > metadata) > - title searches (find resources with known titles) > - author searches (find resources by known authors) > > We MUST be able to filter the results of those searches based on > - the publisher (only display resources published by the University of > Bath) > - the resource language (only display stuff in English) > - any platform requirements (only display stuff that runs on a Mac) > - educational level (only display stuff that is appropriate for use > in FE) > > When resource descriptions are displayed, we MUST be able to show > - copyright info > - resource type > in addition to title, author, publisher, keywords and description. > > It is also HIGHLY DESIRABLE that we can offer browse interfaces based on > - subject classification > - publisher > - educational level > > I know that people may disagree with details in these functional > requirements - the point is that we should be able to write down fairly > easily what it is we are trying to support with the metadata in the UKCMF. > > Having identified our functional requirements we can then look at the > metadata elements that we need to support those requirements. If we take > a look at the current list of mandatory elements in the proposed UKCMF we > see > > - identifier > - title > - language > - description > - publisher > - format > - locator > - copyright > > (apologies if I missed something). I suggest that these elements do not > support the functional requirements above. Consequently, I think we also > need to add > > - general.keywords > - educational.context > - author > - learningresourcetype > - otherplatformrequirements (or 4.4.requirement) > > as mandatory elements. Then we can support all the MUST functionality > outlined above. By also adding > > - classification > > we can also support the HIGHLY DESIRABLE functionality (provided we can > agree a way of using subject classification schemes!). > > Hope this helps. > > One interesting feature of the list of elements above is that all of them > apart from educational.context and otherplatformrequirements map directly > to DC elements - this is very good news I think, and makes > interoperability between 'elearning' systems and 'information' systems > much more straight-forward. > > Regards, > > Andy > -- > Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK > http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933 > Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ -- ******************************************* Ms. Sarah Currier Coordinator / Research Fellow Educational Content Special Interest Group (EC-SIG) CETIS (Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards) Rm. 2.08B, Centre for Academic Practice, University of Strathclyde Graham Hills Building, 50 George Street Glasgow G1 1QE, Scotland, United Kingdom Tel.: +44 (0)141 548 4573 Fax: +44 (0)141 553 2053 E-mail: [log in to unmask] Mob.: +44 (0)7980 855 801 Web (EC-SIG): http://www.cetis.ac.uk/educational-content/ Web (Dept.): http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/CAP/ *******************************************