DCMI: DCMI Education Community

DC-Education Working Group
Breakout Session
15 October 2002, Florence, Italy

The DC-Education Working Group held its face-to-face breakout session at DC2002 on 15 October 2002 from 16:30-18:30. The following paragraphs briefly summarize the Working Group discussion and outline the Group's working agenda for 2002-2003. The PowerPoint presentation used during the breakout session is available.

Appointment of DC-Education Co-Chair Paul Miller:

On August 8, 2002, Jon Mason of Education Network Australia resigned as Co-Chair of the DC-Education Working Group. On 18 October 2002, the DCMI Advisory Board approved the appointment of Paul Miller as Co-Chair. Paul is with Interoperability Focus, a UK national activity jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. Interoperability Focus is based within UKOLN. Paul also serves with the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) in the UK.

Accomplishments of 2001-2002:

Last year's Working Group agenda can be divided into two parts: (1) new domain-specific element/element refinements; and (2) vocabulary development. The Working Group submitted a proposal to the DCMI Usage Board for a new 'educationLevel' refinement for the 'audience' element. The refinement was approved for the DCMI terms namespace with a status of conforming.

Joe Tennis of the University of Washington presented preliminary results from a pilot study of existing 'audience' vocabularies used in select metadata projects in education as a means for possible development of switching languages.

2002-2003 Working Group Work Processes:

The Working Group discussed its working process. In order to move the agenda of the Working Group forward in a more efficient and timely manner in 2002-2003, the Group decided to form task forces with designated leads to address the two items on the 2002-2003 agenda. While focusing the work around task forces, discussions will be held using the DCMI DC-Education list.

2002-2003 TASK FORCE: DCMI/IEEE LOM Application Profile

Task Force Lead: Nigel Ward, Learning Federation, Australia <[email protected]>
The Application Profile Task Force will pursue completion of the agenda outlined in the Ottawa Communiqué to deveop a machine readable compound schema wedding both DCMI and IEEE LTSC LOM metadata. The target is to have such a machine readable application profile schema ready for consideration by the DCMI Advisory Board at the 2003 annual meeting.

2002-2003 TASK FORCE: Vocabulary Encoding Schemes Interoperability

Task Force Lead: Joe Tennis, The Information School of the University of Washington, U.S.A. <[email protected]>

The Vocabulary Encoding Schemes Task Force will continue work already begun in exploring possible domain-specific, high-level vocabulary encoding schemes for both the 'audience' and 'type' elements. The Task Force will also examine the use of existing encoding schemes to make statements regarding teaching methods and characteristics.

Report Submitted by:
Stuart A. Sutton, Co-Chair
[email protected]