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***Apologies for cross posting*** What information about educational resources do you need to record and share? What educational metadata does your organisation use already, and what does it need for the future? Are the existing metadata standards (e.g. IEEE LOM, Dublin Core, etc.) meeting your needs for describing educational resources, or for describing educational aspects of resources? Read on to see how you can help improve interoperability and make your requirements known: The Dublin Core Education Community is looking for use cases to gather requirements for a Dublin Core Education Application Profile. This Application Profile will be modular in nature, only defining properties or elements of relevance to educational use of resources. It will plug into other application profiles. It will use some existing Dublin Core elements, and may propose new ones and/or reuse elements from other metadata standards such as the IEEE LOM. It will also recommend vocabularies for use with some of these properties. This is an opportunity for you to tell us your requirements, so that the DC-Education Application Profile reflects and meets your needs. Creating and submitting a use case is very simple: we are looking for short textual narratives describing how you would like educational metadata to support your work. In January 2008 we will reiterate this call and make available some sample real life use cases, and use case templates, to help you submit your use cases with as little effort as possible. We will also be holding a use case gathering session at the JISC-CETIS Metadata SIG Meeting in London in February 2008; similar sessions could be held in other locations if anyone is interested in volunteering to help with those. *What is a use case?* For our purposes, a use case is a short textual narrative describing your particular requirements of a system. These requirements are broken down into a series of steps taken to achieve them. For the DC-Ed AP, use cases will help capture the functionality you want the Profile to enable. These use cases may be as specific or general as necessary, e.g. you may like to put the case for including a specific element or vocabulary in the AP, or you may like to show how an educational application profile could be used to enhance access to a specific existing collection. Use cases may describe existing and future scenarios, e.g. work you already do, using existing metadata standards; or your own workarounds where there are gaps in existing standards; or requirements you would like to be able to meet but haven't yet. The Dublin Core Education Application Profile is intended to be light-weight and simple to use. The Dublin Core Education AP Task Group is working closely with the IEEE LOM and ISO Metadata for Learning Resources communities to ensure there is a level of harmony between the metadata schemas and that effort is not duplicated. The DC-Ed AP Task Group is looking for use cases to be submitted by the end of February 2008, to enable the drafting of the application profile in time for the Dublin Core conference in Berlin, Germany September 2008. Templates for writing your use case can be downloaded here: Use Case Template <http://writer.zoho.com/public/brassada/DC-Ed-Use-Case-Template/> or from the DC-Ed Use Case page (http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/Use_20Cases) on the Dublin Core Education wiki, where you can find example use cases and further information on writing use cases. Please contact me at [log in to unmask] if you have any questions or need help with any use case you wish to develop. Lara ---- Lara Whitelaw Metadata Development Manager Library and Learning Resources Centre The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA T:+44 (0) 1908 659278 F:+44 (0) 1908 65221 [log in to unmask] library.open.ac.uk <http://library.open.ac.uk/> The Open University is open to people, places, methods and ideas. Explore the new world of information - go Beyond Google <http://www.openuniversity.co.uk/tu120> www.open.ac.uk <http://www.open.ac.uk> P Please consider the environment before printing this email.