***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
*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
Templates
for writing your use case can be downloaded here: 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,
T:+44 (0) 1908 659278 F:+44 (0) 1908 65221
[log in to unmask]
library.open.ac.uk
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