- JISC CETIS MDR SIG Meeting Report

JISC-CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG Meeting, 16 April 2007

Notes by Sarah Currier

The JISC-CETIS Metadata SIG

I presented on the DC-Ed Community and the DC-Education Application Profile work to the SIG meeting, which was, as always, attended by number of UK-based e-learning software developers, learning technologists and librarians, all with an interest in developing, implementing and managing metadata and repositories for learning objects and other teaching & learning materials.

This audience is primarily interested in the IEEE LOM, so it was encouraging to see a good turnout of people wanting to know about how Dublin Core is dealing with educational metadata. Before I took the stage, they had already been apprised of the Joint DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce and DCAM work by Pete Johnston (along with a number of other DC-related presentations). Follow the meeting link to see all of the presentations and download audio files. Pete also posted on the meeting at his eFoundations blog.

Sarah's presentation on DC-Ed AP work

I showed the SIG the

three use cases and the four suggested criteria for candidate vocabularies for the AP, and invited questions and discussion. I then muddied the water somewhat by showing them the

NSDL Metadata Registry, to show them one way in which they might be able to easily make their vocabularies meet the suggested criteria. I was aware that my presentation was to be followed by a similar registry presentation on the

Becta Vocabulary Bank and Studio, which gives UK-based educational technologists and librarians another way of registering and managing vocabularies.

SIG discussion on the four criteria for vocabularies

A lively discussion then ensued as participants wondered what exactly we meant by criteria. For instance, how closely would vocabularies be held to these criteria, and what would happen with good vocabularies that don't meet them? It was pointed out that virtually no existing vocabularies would currently meet all four criteria, and may not for some time to come, if ever.

SIG discussion on recommending vocabularies for the AP, and registering vocabularies

There is an implied over-arching question here: what do we mean when we say we are recommending a vocabulary? Misgivings were expressed that people would not want to or be able to make their vocabularies meet the criteria set out. There seemed to be a misapprehension (no doubt due to lack of clarity on my part) that we are saying that a vocabulary has to be registered in order to be recommended by DC-Ed, whereas we are saying that we believe these are extremely useful criteria to be working towards, and that using the

NSDL Metadata Registry, or the

Becta Vocabulary Bank and Studio, or some similar service, is one easy way for people to enable their vocabularies to meet the criteria, if they weren't already.

SIG discussion on vocabulary registries in general

A couple of issues with registries came up: what if you are using someone else's vocabulary and you want to register it, when they aren't interested, or they have "disappeared" (e.g. a project that has gone defunct). In this case you don't have intellectual property rights to that vocabulary, so you can't register it, although many others may wish to use it or may already be using it. Also, just putting a vocabulary into a registry doesn't mean that it will be maintained.

Conclusion

There was general agreement, however, that the criteria were in and of themselves laudable in light of the goal of creating real-world metadata interoperability. The misgivings in the end seemed to centre around what the criteria mean in terms of recommending vocabularies in the DC-Ed AP; how we present the message to encourage people to give access to their vocabularies, rather than putting them off altogether; and that we shouldn't conflate registration of vocabularies with their acceptability for recommendation in the AP.

Way forward for candidate vocabularies for the DC-Ed AP?

We ended with a tentative suggestion that we begin, here on the DC-Ed Wiki, by listing vocabularies that people suggest to us, with an indication of which of the criteria they meet, so that those looking for vocabularies can make an informed decision, and those suggesting them can see their vocabularies included and possibly be encouraged to increase the potential interoperability of their vocabularies by working towards the criteria. We already have an extensive list of potential vocabularies in the

JISC-CETIS Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and elsewhere, but making these visible on the Wiki alongside the criteria would be a start at seeing what is out there. We also need to have a go at writing an introduction to the criteria that explains what we intend by them, and also what it means to be a vocabulary recommended by a DC Community.

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