Phil’s JISC CETIS blog

Work on the ISO standard Metadata for Learning Resources is reaching a critical point, with bodies such as BSI being asked to vote on whether the current draft text for part 1 (the framework) should be allowed to continue to the next stage of the ISO standardization process. The current draft is the final committee draft, approval by this ballot would indicate that those interested at this stage had reached consensus on the technical content, and the document could become a draft International Standard. There then follows a wider enquiry stage and further votes before the standard is fully ratified.

MLR is being drafted as a multi-part standard and the role of part 1, the framework, is to provide the overall principles rules, and structures for how the other parts define data elements and how they should be used. One of the objectives is that MLR should be as compatible as possible with the LOM and the Dublin Core abstract model (and therefore with RDF though specific bindings are out of scope for this part).

CETIS have passed-on comments about previous drafts to the ISO committee through various channels. The most important channel for us for this draft is BSI, who get a vote in the ballot, and they are looking for comments by the end of February. We would like to put together an agreed position on behalf of those involved in UK F&HE , if you are interested in contributing to this please get in touch (email philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk) and I will pass on the details (update: there is a copy of the draft text on the ISOTC website). We are of course interested in views from outwith UK F&HE, but there might more appropriate routes for you to provide your feedback to BSI or your own national body.

Liddy Nevile is also asking for help in submitting comments from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. I would encourage people to help her with that.

Update: thanks to Erlend Øverby and Andy Heath, for showing me where a copy of this draft can be found.

Update 2: There has been some discussion on the CETIS-Metadata email list about this. Please consider joining in.

Ramlet, or Resource Aggregation Model for Learning, Education and Training (which is working group 13 of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Subcommittee) is an ongoing piece of work which aims to define a conceptual model that includes an ontology and a nomenclature for enabling the interpretation of externalized representations of digital aggregates of resources for learning, education, and training applications. In other words, it will help show semantic relationships between content aggregation formats such as IMS CP, ATOM, MPEG 21 DID and OAI-ORE.

Like many standardization efforts, progress is slow and gradual so it’s difficult to know when it’s worth giving an update. But last week the RAMLET technical editor, Scott Lewis sent this message about the conceptual model:

This standard has taken a long time, but it is a complex standard that presents an ontology for resource aggregation and down-loadable files to help implement the ontology.

The good news is that virtually all of the technical work has been done for the standard and for a series of IEEE recommend practices that will be published after the standard is published. The working group expects to have a draft of the base standard for internal review by year’s end and a balloting draft submitted to IEEE in Q1 of 2010. The series of recommended practices that specify mappings for IMS CP, ATOM, METS, MPEG-21 DID, and OAI-PMH ORE will be published as soon as possible after the standard is published. Again, the technical work for these recommend practice has been done, and it is just a matter of converting that work to IEEE recommended practices after the base standard has been approved.

CETIS’s Wilbert Kraan is taking part in the RAMLET work, working on a proof of concept implementation using standard open source components.