Hi Steve
I think the role of 'subjective metadata' and 'recommender systems' is going
to be what makes e-learning collections fly - this has also been called
'secondary metadata'. The trick is how to do it - I think some of the
e-commerce solutions (reviews, help notes, tech discussion boards etc) give
part of the possible solution, but I think there has to be some human agency
involved - if you like a librarian or community facilitator with some
quality assurance built in as well.
Aida Slavic made a useful comment a while back and said that terms like
'secondary' metadata are fairly empty and it would be much better to use a
term like secondary resources. This makes a lot of sense as the reviews etc
in themselves constitute resources and could be used separately.
I don't think the choice is between a tech solution or a human one - I think
the question is what mix do we need to get what we want.
Just on a very general point my (small) understanding of AI techniques
suggests they work best on well defined problem spaces with well developed
knowledge bases. If this is the case (and I could well be way off beam
here!) how can this apply to subjective or soft data about learning
materials where there are a number of competing theories to explain learning
and a very broad range of descriptors for pedagogic transaction?
This, to me, is one of the attractions of the review / user note approach -
it uses human agents for what they are best at - dealing with complexity
(all be it very messily!). There are countless reviews and advice sources on
the web (and in the real world) and people use them a lot - what happens is
that the user finds a review that seems to meet their requirements and often
they use that review source again because they seem on the 'right
wavelength'. This way we use human agents to filter out the data we want -
this is almost like a return to the traditional subject librarian you get in
research centres. The natural source of this type of expertise for learning
object repositories are the users - so I think we need a community service
approach - you only have to look at tech discussion boards to see a model.
Cheers
John
> John Casey
> Project Officer
> Learning to Learn - an X4L Project
> DAICE
> Airthrey Castle
> University of Stirling
> Stirling
> FK9 4LA
> Tel: +44 (0)1786 467943
> email: [log in to unmask]
web: http://www.stir.ac.uk/departments/daice/l2l/
-----Original Message-----
From: jeyesint [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 01 December 2003 14:08
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Thesauri and authority files for keywords
All,
Was speaking at a DTI run Digital Content Forum. Key topic was
content brokerage and syndication for an elearning marketplace and the
role of metadata. Wayne Hodgins of LOM fame was also talking and he said
that much objective metadata should be automatically generated ( similar
to office documents props ) and then was an interesting discussion
around use of soft techniques for subjective metadata. He proposed use
of recommender systems ( similar to amazon and other online operations
in the states which have been very useful and popular in practice ) and
I asked his view on the role for fuzzy data and logic to give numerical
score for say educational level and then each community could use
appropriate vocabulary to interpret it rather than be the data i.e the
key knowledge is suitable for kids between 5 and 10 not that we call
this x and when looking we could use the power of fuzzy search rather
than the term. Wayne was very positive in favour of this principle and
felt much of the subjective metadata should be User rather than
Classifier focussed .
What do you think
Best
Steve Jeyes
-----Original Message-----
From: The CETIS Metadata Special Interest Group
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Phil Barker
Sent: 28 November 2003 14:58
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Thesauri and authority files for keywords
Scott's right, VDEX can be used for this. zThes has also been used. The
Reload-VDEX tool can be used to convert between VDEX and zThes encodings
(or anything else you care to write an XSLT for). See the discussion for
other suggestions (especially
<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0310&L=cetis-metadata&T=
0&O=D&P=4933>)
Phil.
Scott Wilson wrote:
> Sounds like a job for VDEX to me...
>
> On 28/11/03 12:21 pm, "Ben Ryan" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
>>All,
>> Is anybody using thesauri and/or authority lists for keywords
when
>>collecting metadata, and if so what are you using?
>>
>> We need to add a search/browse capability to our metadata entry
to allow
>>the user to select keywords only from an approved lists and it would
be nice
>>if we could have a linked thesaurus as well.
>>
>>Any thoughts?
>>
>>Regards,
>> Ben
>>
>>-----------------------------------------------
>>Dr Ben Ryan
>>HLSI Software Development Manager
>>University of Huddersfield
>>Tel: 01484 473587
>>E-mail: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>>-----------------------------------------------
>>
--
Phil Barker Learning Technology Adviser
ICBL, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Mountbatten Building, Heriot-Watt University,
Edinburgh, EH14 4AS
Tel: 0131 451 3278 Fax: 0131 451 3327
Web: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~philb/
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