Abstract
In this chapter the authors present the basic characteristics about some existing educational metadata schemata and application profiles. They focus on the widely adopted IEEE LOM standard and give a brief analysis of its structure. Having in mind the utilization of educational metadata schemata by digital repositories preserving educational and research resources, they concentrate on a considerably popular system for this reason, DSpace. The authors want to show how the IEEE LOM metadata set can be incorporated in the default DSpace’s qualified Dublin Core metadata schema, introducing enhancements to the existing University of Patras live installation. For this reason, they document a potential LOM to Dublin Core metadata mapping and reveal possible gains from such an attempt. Further, they propose an ontological model for the repository’s metadata that takes also into account the educational characteristics of resources. In this way, they show how a semantic level of interoperability between educational applications can be achieved.
TopLearning objects (Wiley, 2002), have been defined as “any entity, digital or non-digital, which can be used, re-used or referenced during technology supported learning”. In (Danziel, 2002) learning objects are defined as “an aggregation of one or more digital assets, incorporating meta-data, which represent an educationally meaningful stand-alone unit” and according to (IEEE LTSC, 2002), a learning object is “any entity -digital or non-digital- that may be used for learning, education or training”. Examples of reusable digital sources are images, video files, audio files or even a web page.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Repositories: Mechanisms responsible for storing, describing, preserving, managing and distributing any kind of digital material.
Application Profiles: Combinations of different metadata schemata.
IEEE LOM: A metadata standard about learning objects, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association.
DSpace: A open source digital repository system that provides the tools for management of digital assets. It is mainly used for the deployment of institutional repositories.
Mapping: Correspondence between two different data models.
Interoperability: The ability of diverse systems and applications to co-operate (inter-operate).
Educational Metadata: Metadata about learning objects.