DCMI Education Community

The DC-Education Working Group held its face-to-face breakout session at DC-2004 on 11 October 2004 from 13:30-15:30. The following paragraphs briefly summarize the Working Group discussion and outline the Group's working agenda for 2004-2005. The PowerPoint presentation used during the breakout session is available.

Accomplishments of 2003-2004:

The Working Group meeting began with a brief overview of accomplishments in 2003-2004:

• DCMI/IEEE LOM cooperative work
  • Fequently-asked-questions (FAQ):
    A full draft of the FAQ is complete and under review.
  • DC-Education application profile:
    The basic framework for doing the DC-based application profiles has been hammered out by the Usage Board and through the experience of the DC-Libraries Working Group. Actual work on the DC-Education Application Profile will begin immediately.
• Vocabulary development processes
  • Vocabulary workshop: NSDL
    A vocabulary workshop funded by NSF/NSDL was held in the U.S. this past spring. Work of the Group continues on developing appropriate methodologies for vocabulary development and management in networked environments.
• Development of clearinghouse for project information
  • Core technical infrastructure
    The GEM Exchange has agreed to host the clearinghouse and to manage the content management system and interface. A doctoral student at the Information School of the University of Washington has gathered together education and training project information to seed the clearinghouse.

Work Plan for 2004-2005:

The Working Group focused on the coming year by duscssing the following points:

1. DCMI/IEEE LOM cooperative work.

   The FAQ will be finished, published and a maintenance process established. Since the application profile work noted below needs to incorporate reference to a number of IEEE LOM elements, the work on the integration of LOM elements and DCMI properties in an AP will have to be resolved. The first step in this process is to clearly define the problems of such an integration when the elements/properties are defined under different abstract data models. The goal of this step is to publish a paper identifying the issues and proposing a Semantic Web solution.

2. DC-Education application profile.

   The application profile (AP) work will take the majority 2004-2005 year. A draft of the AP will be ready for discussion at DC2005. A drafting committee will be appointed to work on the draft AP following the example of the DC-Libraries Working Group process. Attention will also be paid to controlled vocabulary development where deemed appropriate.

3. Development of clearinghouse for projects.

   The clearinghouse will be operational by September 2005. Processes and accompanying content management workflows for submitting project information will be ready for demonstration at DC2005.

Report Submitted by:
Stuart A. Sutton, Co-Chair
[email protected]
Submitted: October 15, 2004