Hello from down-under.

I would like to contribute to some substantial conversations on this issue
of an educational standard for all of us to share.

I guess in some ways it was our work for the Victorian Education Channel
gateway  that started this idea of education working together as a
community under the DC umbrella.  We (the team working with the Vic Ed
Dept) are in a sense late-comers to the educational metadata exercise but
in others ways we (the Ed Dept) have been at this for a long time.  The
Victorian Department participates in the EdNA effort (EdNA is our national
gateway at http://www.edna.edu.au).  The Dept  has been developing DC-style
metadata for the substantial websites, including SOFWeb
(http://www.sofweb.vic.edu.au) and for some time.  The metadata is stored
locally and used to identify materials for teachers and students in
Victoria.  The current exercise is to make as many of the quality resources
discoverable as possible through the development of a Victoria-wide
metadata repository.  Immediately, the task is to use this repository,
without encroaching on the activities of the more than 200 Departmental
websites involved, to make the valuable resources discoverable and
accessible through a single gateway.  The system will be launched in
November (we are told!!!)

We did what many others have done: we asked what do we need to know about
the resources for our own purposes.  We also spent some time trying to
discover what kinds of resources we would need to work with, and how they
might be clumped together, if at all.  We assumed we would have to use the
common DC elements and then those that are sort of obligatory in Australia,
for example those that make the metadata suitable for harvesting by EdNA,
and then perhaps some others so we could exchange metadata with significant
other educational communities represented by organisations such as GEM,
IMS, etc.

Well, we worked hard at this idea and then began to wonder if life was
changing for the DC community after the experiences that are, after all,
beginning to stack up.

Simon Cox suggested we might be interested in thinking seriously about
qualified DC.  He explained how we'd do this and it struck us that this
might be a good way to go.  Still we had to determine if this was an OK
thing to do - would we be on our own if we did this?  Next we had to be
sure that we would capture the information that others value so we worked
on the mapping of other standards to the set of DC and qualified DCelements
we proposed.  This process worked fairly well, in our opinion.  Next, we
felt we had to be sure that even though we were building an RDF repository
and would have no trouble using qualified DC, we would be able to do the
mapping from our metadata to others' standards so we could export what they
might want.

Significantly, we realised that one of the main things that would make the
difference was determining if others would be interested in our approach.
We worried about things like multiple namespaces and wondered how silly we
were being.  Then we thought we should ask others to get together with us
and see if we could all work out a simple shared system in the light of the
current wisdom about metadata and the opportunity being offered by the work
on qualifiers for DC7.

We are not yet able to release publicly all of our work justifying our
metadata position.   We would like to share our ideas about a set of DC
elements and qualified DC elements - in fact a set we would like to see
harmonised and finally known as the QED set.  A note attached to this email
contains this information in a copy of a note we sent to the DC qualifiers
working groups some time ago.  Please excuse our efforts to make sense of
others' elements.

In the meantime,  we point out that significant communities such as EdNA,
IMS and GEM have been mapped to DC and a number of groups have already
established their lists of essential elements.  We are keen to work with
such groups to see if there is a set of elements that we, as an educational
community, can value and share.  This process can be a little difficult -
although we are offering our working docs, we are not really keen to put up
our work showing how we map other groups' elements to ours or to existing
DC.  Some groups have made public at least how their elements map to DC.
Perhaps we should establish a format so that each group can take
responsibility for the publication of this information about their
elements?  Then we might be able to make some real progress on this
harminisation task.

Please feel free to comment on these notes.

Liddy