Dublin Core EducationApplication Profile Module

Sarah CurrierModerator, DCMI Education Community

Product Manager, Intrallect Ltd

Group Improv, Repository Fringe, 31 July 2008, Edinburgh, UK

Overview of Session

1. Brief overview of DC-Education Community (5 mins)

2. Introduction to DC-Ed Application Profile work (5 mins)

3. Requirements gathering so far (15 mins)

4. Group improv: feedback on issues; what are your priorities for educational metadata? (30 mins)

Dublin Core Educational Work

DCMI Education Community• Co-Moderators: Diane Hillmann (Cornell University);

Sarah Currier (Intrallect Ltd)• DC-Education Application Profile Task Group

– Lara Whitelaw (OU) co-ordinated use case gathering

Website: http://www.dublincore.org/groups/education/Wiki: http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/ JISCmail list:http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/DC-EDUCATION.html

Dublin Core Educational Work

NOTE:

“The DCMI Education Community is a forum for individuals and organizations involved in implementing Dublin Core and other learning resource metadata in the education domain. The objective of the Community is to promote interoperability within the domain through the use of standard metadata and consensus good practices.”

Dublin Core Educational Work

NOTE:

“The DCMI Education Community is a forum for individuals and organizations involved in implementing Dublin Core and other learning resource metadata in the education domain. The objective of the Community is to promote interoperability within the domain through the use of standard metadata and consensus good practices.”

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile• Aim: to provide a “modular” AP to support

interoperable description of educational aspects of resources.

• Scope: educationally significant properties available in Dublin Core + any other educational properties, e.g. elements from the LOM.

• Out-of-scope: will not define or give guidelines for usage of non-educational properties, or non-educational usage of properties.

• Modular: this will (we hope!) enable people to “plug in” the AP with other APs they are using, e.g. the Libraries AP, the Scholarly Works AP, a modular accessibility AP, or a local AP.

Dublin Core Application Profiles

The DCMI Architecture Forum developed:- Dublin Core Abstract Model- Singapore Framework for Dublin Core

Application Profiles

The Singapore Framework requires:- Functional requirements (mandatory) - Domain model (mandatory) - Description Set Profile (DSP) (mandatory) - Usage guidelines (optional)- Encoding syntax guidelines (optional)

Singapore FrameworkThe Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles:

http://dublincore.org/architecturewiki/SingaporeFramework/

A Note on VocabulariesThe Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles:

http://dublincore.org/architecturewiki/SingaporeFramework/

A Note on VocabulariesThe Singapore Framework requires:- Functional requirements (mandatory) - Domain model (mandatory) - Description Set Profile (DSP) (mandatory) - Usage guidelines (optional)- Encoding syntax guidelines (optional)

The DC-Ed AP will recommend vocabularies for fields included in the Description Set Profile where vocabularies are used.

The DC-Ed AP Task Group have already collated a number of vocabularies for Instructional Method and Resource Type:

http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/Vocabularies

Singapore FrameworkThe Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles:

http://dublincore.org/architecturewiki/SingaporeFramework/

[…] describe the functions that the application profile is designed to support, as well as functions that are out of scope.

[…] form the basis of evaluating the application profile for internal consistency and for giving guidance on the appropriateness of the application profile for a given use.

A Note About LOM and DCJoint DCMI/IEEE LTSC Task Force

- Grew out of Mikael Nilsson’s work on an RDF binding for the LOM, which drew heavily on early RDF work with Dublin Core.

- Became apparent that the LOM and DC had completely incompatible underlying models.

- DC started developing the DC Abstract Model (DCAM) based on RDF principles.

- Task Force is working on expressing LOM using the DCAM.- Gives a de facto translation of LOM in RDF (somewhat lossy, so

not strictly a binding).- Will support use of LOM elements in DC-Ed Application Profile.

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue55/currier/http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile Use Cases

Functional requirements

We have the following general requirements:

a. Support for Resource Discovery b. Support for Educational Use of Resourcesc. Extensibilityd. Jurisdiction Neutrality

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile Use Cases

Functional requirements

What about more specific requirements?We asked for use cases from the community on:

• What educational attributes or properties do you want to describe?

• What are your real world interoperability needs?• What do your users want to search for / by?• What else?

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile Use Cases

Use cases summary:

• 48 use cases and scenarios gathered• From 23 organisations• Representing 6 countries (UK, US, Canada, Australia,

New Zealand, Spain) + 2 international organisations• Most educational sectors (workplace training;

community/lifelong learning; HE/FE; primary; secondary)

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile Use CasesUse cases summary: what properties? Table 1

Property No.

Subject 25

Learning objectives / outcomes / competencies 19

Audience (educational level) (e.g. UKEL; age range?) 18

Relation (to educational achievement standards) 14

Resource type 11

Relation (to alternative resources) 10

Instructional method (AKA Pedagogical approach) 9

User-generated metadata to support reuse (e.g. Reviews / Comments / Annotations / Tags)

9

Audience (context) (e.g. HE; FE; lifelong learning) 8

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile Use CasesUse cases summary: what properties? Table 2

Property No.

Audience (mediator) (e.g. teacher; parent…) 5

Contributor / Creator role 4

Language of intended user 4

Typical learning time 3

Difficulty 3

Relation (to specific courses) 2

Cultural context / place of origin 2

Prerequisites 1

Date of use 1

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application ProfileProblem Areas:- Who says?

- Who created this review?- Who says this resource meets that competency?

- Correlation- How closely does this learning object correlate to that

educational achievement standard?- Educational level / context

- Blurred semantics- Two different elements in the LOM; three if you include

Typical Age Range- Is “Higher Education” a “context” or a “level”?

- What about granularity of descriptions?- Are user-generated reviews, correlation statements,

etc. separate resources?

Dublin Core Educational WorkDC-Ed Application Profile

Some of these problem areas speak to the problem of the DC-Education AP Domain Model.

Which we don’t have yet.

• We’ve looked at OAIS and FRBR.• Where these leave off, our problems begin.

NB: Our thanks to the JISC Learning Materials AP Project:http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/lmap/

Dublin Core Educational WorkGroup Improv…

What to do now?NB: I am here to get your input

• Discuss any further requirements you have, or further refinements on the existing requirements.

• Look at domain model issues?• Discussion on Audience issues?• Anything else arising folk want to discuss?• Are there different groups here interested in different

issues?- If so should we break into groups and report back, or all discuss everything together?

Dublin Core Educational Work

Please join the DC-Ed Community!

E-mail me or Dianes.currier@intrallect.comdih1@cornell.edu

Join the DC-Ed list to be notified of new developments and take part in discussions

Thanks to Diane Hillmann, Lara Whitelaw, JISC-CETIS, and the DC-Education Community for their contributions so far, including

to these slides.

http://www.intrallect.com