Metadata and Digital Repositories

UK eUniversities Worldwide, London, 4 Sept 2003

Report by Phil Barker, helped by notes from Tina Manoharan

A list of attendees is given at the end of this report

CETIS Update

Phil Barker gave an introduction to the aims of CETIS and the Metadat SIG, and an update on CETIS's funding and the other SIGs. [Introdution to CETIS, powerpoint presentation, 62kB.]

Sarah Currier, coordinator of the CETIS Educational Content SIG (EC SIG), announced that the EC SIG is publishing a series "briefing papers" providing introductory explanations the specifications covered by that SIG. They are available from the Educational Content SIG website.

IMS Update

Phil Barker gave an update on the current activities of the IMS groups of relevance to this SIG, including:

• Relignment of IMS Learning Resource Meta-data with IEEE 1484.12 Learning Object Metadata.
• IMS Resources List Interoperability.
• [IMS VDEX was covered in the afternoon].

[The powerpoint presentation is availabe, 52kB]

The discussion afterwards raised two salient points:

There's a problem, that we are stuck with, concerning how to deal with current implementations of IEEE LOM metadata which use the older IMS XML binding.

RLI should be made to be consistent with RSS.

Lorna Campbell gave an update on work starting between IMS, IEEE and DCMI looking at ways which these bodies can work together. Her powerpoint presentation (61kB) is available. It was stressed that the LOM would be stable as a standard for at least 5 years, and that work such as this, looking into how it might develop, should not put people off using it.

BS8419

Lorna gave a brief notice on the progress towards BS8419, which aims to describe best practice for organisations writing metadata application profiles and cross-walks. Her powerpoint slides are available (62kB).

UK LOM Core (and Learning Resource Type Vocabulary)

Lorna also gave an update on the UK LOM Core, an application profile of the IEEE LOM for UK use. Draft 0.1 has bee circulated, and adopted as the basis for several implementations of the LOM. Lorna is working on the next revision, which will not contain any substantial changes.

The same presentation also reports on work by the RDN and LTSN to develop a shared vocabulary scheme for resource types which may form the basis of a recommendation for the UK LOM Core.

Other issues raised include the use of identifiers, XML binding, and the role that this SIG could play in keeping a record of who is using which elements from the LOM.

Lorna's powerpoint slides are available (82 kB).

Report on the Identifiers Meeting

Phil gave a report on the SIG Identifiers Meeting, which was held in Bristol in July, this report was a summary of the one on this website.

IMS VDEX, and VDEX Editor

Phil gave an overview of the the new IMS VDEX specification which allows the encoding and exchange of controlled vocabularies. He also gave an overview of work which Tina is doing to integrate VDEX into a metadata editor. Phil's powerpoint slides are available (68kB)

In discussion of this Andy Powell asked whether this new specification could do anything which couldn't be done with the existing specifications for encoding vocabularies, for example Zthes or XML Topic Maps (XTM) (and many others).

Quality Assurance for Metadata Creation>

Sarah Currier presented a summary of a paper she has co-authored and will be presenting at the Dublin Core conference in Seattle in October. Another paper form Sarah on the subject is available on this site, as is Sarah's powerpoint presentation (2.84MB).

Attendees

Evaluation Summary

A summary of the evaluation forms returned is available for those interested.