From: XML Daily Newslink. Monday, 25 January 2010
The Use of Metadata for Educational Resources in Digital Repositories
D. A. Koutsomitropoulos, A. D. Alexopoulos (et al.), D-Lib Magazine
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january10/kout/01kout.html
See also IEEE P1484.12.4, LOM Using the Dublin Core Abstract Model: http://preview.tinyurl.com/yc9bvu3
An implied requirement of today’s World Wide Web is to provide mechanisms
that store, manage and discover resources in an efficient way. This
becomes a necessity for all kinds of electronically available resources,
the number of which is increasing at an extremely rapid rate. Digital
repositories are mechanisms that fulfill this requirement, provided that
they utilize appropriate metadata schemata for the characterization of
their content…
A popular system that operates as a digital repository for educational
purposes is DSpace. DSpace uses the qualified Dublin Core (DC) element
set as its base metadata schema. However, because the DC schema is
sometimes proven to be inadequate for the efficient characterization of
educational material, we attempt the development of an application
profile, extended with the LOM metadata standard, and we tailor it to
the needs of an educational repository. At the same time, we propose an
ontology using these LOM elements that helps to better capture the
semantic notions of the underlying concepts and forms the basis for the
deployment of digital repositories with advanced services…
The incorporation of the LOM schema required a careful process through
which we investigated exactly which LOM concepts were missing from the
system’s metadata registry. Those concepts were imported into the
repository’s inherent metadata schema and were mapped to the appropriate
DC-Terms properties. In addition, we extended the DSpace OAI harvesting
facility to make it possible to expose these newly adopted LOM metadata.
This idea can be similarly applied in any other OAI-compliant repository,
resulting in the interoperable export and reuse of its educational
metadata.
As a means to better capture the semantics of the relation between LOM
and DC, we have also proposed the basis for an LOM ontology. This
ontology explicitly represents LOM filler-values and vocabularies as
proper entities, while allowing their classification and association
with DC-Terms notions under well-defined relations. Therefore, it can
be further utilized to enable semantic-aware services and suggests a
means for providing semantic interoperability…”