eBlog by Tore Hoel

The Umeå meeting of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 confirmed that the co-editors of Part 5 Educational are on the right track. It seems that the consensus to build the MLR framework on semantic web / web architecture approach is more stable now, and that we have thumbs up for continuing our way to explore how to describe educational aspects of learning resources.

In this blog post I will point you to where to find the activities leading up the next version of MLR Part 5, with a deadline of 18 December for the next Working Draft. I will also give some brief comments on the framework and principles for development, closing with some comments on this current model from WD3.

Work towards WD4 (to be turned into a First Committee Draft right after the Osaka meeting in March 2010)

We will have three online meetings, the first Friday, October 16th. If you want to contribute, please do so by joining the FlashMeeting. A wiki is set up to support the work and provide background information.

In the first meeting we will concentrate on conceptual models, looking at what is happening in projects like ICOPER, European Learner Mobility project, etc.

Where do metadata live – the MLR approach

With the most fierce fights over MLR behind us, we are now pretty sure that MLR will support some sound principles for developing the new parts and application profiles that the communities need. First, we don’t think that metadata are restricted to repositories of well defined and conforming complex metadata records. We think metadata live on the web in the cloud somewhere, and that they come in bits and pieces without some benevolent metadata schema that is so kind to explain to us how all the elements are to be interpreted. In a future semantically enabled web of information and resources we will be able to make sense of the fragments of metadata we come across because they are identified in a way that allows us to search for more linked data.

In this approach the concept of interoperability is not so much on a record level. The emphasis is on a semantic level. We need to make sure that we are talking about the same thing, using the same concepts. And if we don’t understand the detailed concept we have got, we should be able to track back to a higher level concept that we recognise from the international standard at hand. This does not mean that we don’t care about interoperability between repositories. But we think that the value of such interoperability is within well defined communities that agree upon developing their own application profiles. Interoperability on a global scale for learning resources is just a dream that is never come true. Between very different cultures we should be happy if we are able to reuse some of the concepts and definitions, to make the global conversation about learning, education and training a little bit more easy to facilitate.

So, what are the sound principles of MLR? In my opinion it boils down to some very simple guidelines.

• Every resource (and data element specification) shall by identified by a URI.
• We should reuse data elements, especially the generic ones, using Domain and Range to make sure that elements “do their job” in the context they are used.
• All elements should be extendible to allow “graceful degradation”, i.e., where refinements of an element is used, it should be possible for implementations to be able to identify and use their supertypes.
• The different parts of the standard need an Applications Profiles. This is where you where you restrict your model and define structures. The standard itself should be as simple as possible, capturing the elements needed to build applications for a varied group of users.

Implications for development of the Educational part

When building the Educational Part of MLR we should continue our work on trying to come up with some high level conceptual model of educational aspects of the use of learning resources. First we should try to map out the high level concepts, knowing that the finer granularity will be taken care of in the application profiles, given that we are able to create the necessary elements to connect to. Second, when we have a pretty stable conceptual map, we should put it to test to see if it possible to accommodate the different usage scenarios we have identified. (For instance, if we have only the two concepts of Context and Learning Outcome related to a learning resource we will not be able to make a useful inference of the relation between one resource and two contexts and outcomes. To make that happen we would need some kind of usage or activity element, as Pete Johnston demonstrated in an earlier discussion in the MLR Part 5 online meeting series.