As I write there is a meeting near Paris where the future direction of the proposed ISO Standard on Metadata for Learning Resources is being discussed. CETIS were asked to contribute to this meeting, and Lorna and I have done so through a position statement circulated to the delegates. In this post I’ll give some background to that position paper and to ISO MLR itself.
First a potted history. Some time back, around 2002/3 the IEEE LOM was put up for standardization by ISO (well, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 if you want to be precise). It was decided that the LOM was not suitable for adoption as an ISO standard as it stood, and so a working group started to investigate the issues and propose remedies. The outcome was outlined by Norm Friesen in January 2006 in his CanCore article Building a Better LOM. Since then development has continued at what Mikael Nilsson has called “quite a distance from the community“, resulting in drafts for a multi-part standard. Part one of the standard, the Framework, sets out the principles, rules, structures etc. on which MLR is based and as such is fundamental to the standard. The drafts of this Framework, the most recent of which is CD3 have been criticized on several fronts for being over long, over complicated, and for adopting a structure-orientated XML approach rather than one which is explicitly semantics. See, for example, this from Tore Hoel, and this by various authors from DCMI (which, while it’s a comment on part 2 of the proposed standard, relates to issues pertaining to part 1).
The meeting taking place is a ballot resolution meeting to address the many negative comments registered against CD 3. There exists a proposed route for re-directing the MLR work, outlined here and here and here. Some of the authors of this approach have asked for CETIS’s support. As our position statement describes, for various reasons we are able to offer little beyond moral support, and with some caveats (not so much about the approach per se more to do with the context in which it is being pursued).
