This posting was prompted by Judy O’Connell’s blog entry on “Building an education strategy for metadata”. I agree whole heartedly with the sentiments of the entry and as another information management professional I appreciate the enormous benefits derived from the use of metadata.
We at education.au (national ICT agency) have had an involvement with metadata since the mid nineties. You may ask how and why. As the managers of EdNA Online we needed a tool to enable us to manage and deliver online resources and services to the education and training community in Australia.
Funded by the national, state and territory governments, EdNA Online is a national gateway to educational resources and services. Working collaboratively with our stakeholders (the education and training community) we developed the EdNA metadata standard which is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES). Our vision was for the Standard to be used by all education sectors in Australia - that is schools, Vocation and Technical Education and higher education.
The EdNA standard was embraced by the education departments which enabled us to harvest their resources and share them nationally with everyone via EdNA Online.
In working with metadata over the years we have come to realize that one metadata standard cannot meet the various needs of different organisations and different projects. What we find has been taking place, in recent years, is that projects and educational organisations have been developing their own metadata schemas (based on International standards) better known as Metadata Application Profiles.
The EdNA Metadata Standard, Dublin Core and IEEE LOM v1.0 can be the base schemas for such profiles.
The EdNA Metadata Standard was first published in 1998 and has not been updated since 2002. In its current form it has limitations and does not meet well the emerging needs of many educational projects. The AICTEC Metadata Reference Group is cognizant of the fact that one educational metadata schema cannot meet all information management needs. What is needed by organisations is assistance in determining specific metadata needs – what metadata to select from what standards and how to implement a metadata system.
We too at education.au, in managing educational services, have created metadata to manage and deliver new services such as the EdNA news headlines and the events calendars. Work is also under way to create application profiles to manage the various collections of EdNA resources.
Currently we use the EdNA Metadata Standard to deliver resources, from the EdNA repository, to the Government Education Portal and over 12 other educational websites. Metadata enables us to create site structures where resources are displayed by topic, deliver headlines by sector and service, and provide metadata search options.
Meta does matter in education!
3 Comments
Helen, it is good to read a concise summary of what Edna has been doing, and the clear understanding that your group has about the benefits, needs, and development requirements for managing metadata. This is an area that need deep examination by my educational group, and so I may well contact educationau for a chat about possibilities! Looking forward to more online discussion on this in Australia. Cheers, Judy
Do you think that it is possible to create one metadata standard that would embrace all areas, with only few ceratin modifications required?
Sarah, I don’t think it’s possible to have just one metadata standard that could embrace all knowledge areas and industries. We can have elements that are shared by metadata profiles developed for specific purposes. What we are finding is that as the internet matures and a range of web services become available our metadata needs also need refinement to describe these services.
As managers and developers of educational products and services we have found that we need different sets of metadata to describe the range of resources and services provided by us. For example we need different elements to describe events (conferences, seminars, meetings, etc), collaborative services (such as discussion lists, Groups, forums), learning objects, people and collections of resources. All these different types may have elements that are shared but will also have elements that are unique. Such being the case one metadata schema will not accommodate all needs.
Standards like Dublin Core and IEEE LOM are the two main standards that people look to when they need to implement a metadata system. But in most case people will take what they need from these standards and adopt them for local usage. Interoperability is retained when the elements are used in a consistent manner and apply the same semantics. So is it possible to create one metadata standard and use it to describe everything? The short answer is no – and what do we mean by standard in this context? Does it have to be approved by a standards body?
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