Hi Niall,
See comments in text...
----- Original Message -----
From: Niall Sclater
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 7:29 PM
Subject: multiple instances of LOM elements etc
I emailed this list a while back with an application profile for assessment metadata (TOIA-COLA application profile v1.2 available at http://www.cetis.ac.uk/profiles/uklomcore/ ). In my quest to get metadata packaged neatly with assessments and questions and therefore achieving maximum interoperability with other systems I am now getting the TOIA tools to export content packages with full metadata. It was becoming clear that metadata inside the assessments and questions was not going to be understood by any repository system or assessment tool unless it was part of a manifest in a content package. This is now working to some extent but there are a few outstanding issues - I'd be grateful for some advice.
1.. I am creating multiple instances of certain elements such as classification and classification.taxonpath. Is it correct to do this? Neither RELOAD nor Intralibrary seem to be able to display multiple instances of these correctly and I'm not sure if it's because their authors haven't yet implemented it or because I shouldn't be doing this in the first place. If it is correct to do so (it's obviously acceptable for other elements such as lifecycle.contribute) then presumably I can continue to output this and suggest to others that they adapt their systems accordingly?
Pierre: The classification element in the LOM has a smallest permitted maximum of 40 items. So tools should allow at least 40 occurrences of the element. I don't know about Intralibrary, but RELOAD currently only is able of one occurrence per element in the 'Form' view, but allows multiple (unlimited?) occurrences in the 'Full' view (see tab next to Form) of the Metadata editor.
2.. Using en-GB as the general.language and also for the langstrings throughout the metadata is not recognised by these systems - should I just revert to en?
Pierre: Yes, see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt section 2.3 "Choice of language tag" says:
2. When a language has both an ISO 639-1 2-character code and an ISO
639-2 3-character code, you MUST use the tag derived from the ISO
639-1 2-character code.
3.. I've added "further education" as educational.context and a couple of new educational.learningresourcetypes none of which are defined in the LOM. Intralibrary with what seems to be a strict interpretation of the LOM forces me to change further education to one of the other specified ones. I don't see why I should have to do this as none of them are suitable - but in order to achieve interoperability do I 1. leave it out altogether, 2. choose an unsatisfactory alternative or 3. ask Intrallect to make their tool less strict? RELOAD doesn't give further education as an option but does at least allow me to keep that data there.
Have a look at the 'Full' view of the RELOAD editor. Here you can add the elements and you can see that Context both has a 'source' and 'value'. With source = 'LOMv1.0' you should stick to the values defined in the LOMv1.0 vocabulary, but with other sources (you can define your own for RELOAD) you're free to choose your own.
Best regards,
Pierre Gorissen
IT Consultant
Educational Development Department
Fontys University of Professional Education
P.O. Box 347
NL-5600 AH Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Phone: +31-(0)877 879 369
Fax: +31-(0)877 875 822
Mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.fontys.nl/
