Oktober 31, 2005
EU-konfikter skaper vansker for standardisering av CDM
Standardiseringsorganisasjonen CEN har for tiden alvorlige vansker med sin finansiering, noe som går ut over prosjektet med å få laget en europeisk metadatastandard for å beskrive kurstilbud - den såkalte Course Description Metadata-spesifikasjonen. Som kjent har eStandard-prosjektet fremmet forslag om et slikt prosjekt overfor CEN/ISSS Workshop on Learning Technologies. Prosjektforslaget har gått gjennom alle slags kvalitetssikringsprosesser, og var nå klart til å starte opp i høst med å sette sammen prosjektgruppe og gå løs på oppgavene med å vurdere den norske CDM-spesifikasjonen, den svenske EMIL-spesifikasjonen osv.
Problemet ligger på et høyt nivå over den aktuelle CEN-arbeidsgruppen. Det er EUs revisjonskontor som har høner å plukke med CEN-organisasjonen - noe som resulterer at inntektsstrømmen er satt på vent - og dermed vil ikke nye prosjekter bli startet.
Dette fikk vi opplyst på siste CEN/ISSS WS-LT-møte i Brussel 18. oktober.
For CDM-arbeidet er dette uheldig, da det er mange aktiviteter på området som nå trenger europeisk harmonisering, f.eks. i Norge, Storbritannia, Finland, Frankrike osv.
Det franske utdanningsdepartementet har imidlertid tatt initiativ til et eContent pluss-prosjekt som tar sikte på å lage en europeisk profil av CDM. Dette prosjektet har Norge sagt seg interessert å delta i.
Posted by toreh at 10:52 FM
September 30, 2005
Ingen norsk alenegang mot bruk av ontologier
Tommy Nordeng i det nordnorske innovasjonsselskapet CERPUS har på oppdrag av UFD laget en forstudie om hvordan vi kan skaffe oss en norsk ontologi for utdanning og forskning - til glede og nytte ved en rekke prosjekter som tar sikte på å øke navigerbarhet i kunnskaps- og informasjonsressurser. OLUF-rapporten (PDF) er nå til vurdering i departementet - som sikkert lurer på om dette er ideer som bærer for mye preg av galskapen til rapportens navnebror fra Raillkattlia.
Da er det interessant - og betryggende - at vi ikke står overfor noen vanlig norsk alenegang. Det er noen der som har prøvd å gå denne veien før - ja, som faktisk ligger litt foran oss. Og som vanlig er det finnene som leder an. Bak en sterk kryptering av ord med mange dobbeltkonsonanter og vokaler (finsk) har det siden 2003 foregått et prosjekt under navnet FinnONTO. Prosjektet varer ut 2007 - og har nettopp som mål å lage en finsk nasjonal ontologi. Arbeidet ledes av Helsinki University of Technology og Helsingfors universitet. Det bygger på den finske "generaltesaurusen" som Nasjonalbiblioteket eier - og prosjektet er finansert av det finske National Technology Agency Tekes og et konsortium av 14 offentlige og private organisasjoner, herunder det finske nasjonalbiblioteket.
Det er mye å lære av finnene - og av den korte og lettleste artikkelen som presenterer prosjektet: Finnisch National Ontologies for the Semantic Web - towards a Content and Service Infrastructure (PDF). Tilmed tenkning om å tilby dette som en webtjeneste er på plass! Look to Finland!
Posted by toreh at 08:32 FM
September 27, 2005
Bibliotekverdenen er ikke så forskjellig fra vår
Overskriften er ment humoristisk. Men konferansen som nå holdes i København under tittelen Building the Info Grid - viser at biblioteksfronten har nådd langt i å rydde vei for en utvikling basert på en tjenesteorientert arkitektur - se presentasjonene som nå legges ut. Konferansen arrangeres av Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek.
Posted by toreh at 08:09 FM
September 10, 2005
Skattkammer over konferanse-papers
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative har opprettet et repositorium over konferanse-papers. Dette er en skattgruve for alle som er interessert i metadata, repositorier osv. I neste uke er det Dublin Core-møte utenfor Madrid. Snart vil konferansepublikasjonene herfra være å finne i repositoriet.
Se http://purl.oclc.org/dcpapers
Posted by toreh at 03:59 EM
Mai 08, 2005
Metadata i utdanningssammenheng
Hvorfor er det jeg tror at George Macgregor fra Centre for Digital Library Research her ikke helt har forstått hvordan det som skjer innen utdanning og læring er noe helt annet enn det som skjer innenfor et bibliotek??? Hvis vi graver oss ned i denne diskusjonen, tror jeg vi er på sporet etter hva god læringsteknologi skal hjelpe oss med!
> One thing is certain - the days of mandated taxonomy, static systems and
> controlled vocabularies (in the strictest sense) are numbered!
This is an extremely curious statement for the CETIS-METADATA list and one
that I find to be erroneous. True, there are some merits to a folksonomy
(esp. for browsing & serendipity) and more research should certainly be
undertaken to ascertain their *relative* potential. But - and this is a big
'but' - these benefits tend to reside within small pockets of practice (i.e.
Del.icio.us and Flickr) and it remains difficult to envisage how such
techniques can be applied out-with these contexts.
How, for instance, is such an approach expected to scale, particularly in
those ubiquitous distributed systems involving users from more than one
cultural context? (It's worth noting that even within the UK the problem of
regional cultural contexts is already problematic with respect to subject
retrieval). Closer to home, how is such a system to be usefully applied
with the deposit of learning objects and the distributed searching of those
learning object repositories?
Given the high probability of subject tagging ambiguity, the lack of synonym
control, variant spellings, variant punctuation, name authority control, not
to mention the fact the majority of users suffer from the Belkin's infamous
'Anomalies State of Knowledge' (and are therefore often incapable of
formulating search queries, let alone assigning meaningful subjects
descriptors), I find it highly questionable that such a "scheme" could ever
be used effectively to support meaningful resource discovery and distributed
searching. In addition, even if all of the above could be reconciled, there
are still issues pertaining to the semantic relationships and the syntactic
relationships of all the terms / subject captions used by the folksonomy to
describe information entities. Would these important relationships be
dispensed with? Indeed, it remains to be seen how a system (underpinned by a
folksonomy) could be effectively mined so as to increase IR precision, even
by intelligent agents. Users would simply experience high recall or no
results at all. And, of course, it goes without saying that meaningful
resource discovery or distributed searching would be an unviable proposition
which, to my mind, is an unwelcome scenario when we should be 'thinking
globally before acting locally' in the 21st century.
Further, the assumption that users have the necessary skills, the will or
the infinite time required to engage with an ever expanding world of
knowledge so that subject mappings (a 'pattern of relationships') can be
created is - to my mind - quite reductionist and reveals a common lack of
understanding regarding the complexities of subject mappings. Numerous
research projects (funded by international organisations like OCLC or even
the JISC) have found that creating exact match mappings between *controlled*
subject headings is extremely complex, time consuming and resource
intensive. So, if it remains difficult within a controlled environment to
create mappings with experienced information professionals, how feasible
would it be in an uncontrolled environment?
I agree with the sentiment that a taxonomy should not be 'kept' private and
that 'a taxonomy should come from ourselves and our interactions with
others', but current controlled vocabularies, classification schemes and
taxonomies ARE largely derived from the people, albeit it in a more
elaborate fashion. Most prominent schemes are regularly revised and such
revisions entail a detailed analysis of current knowledge and literature
whereby appropriate terminology and concepts are harvested and inserted. If
one is fortunate enough to use a dynamic facility, such as OCLC's connexion,
then one can expect revisions every minute of everyday. These revisions
will be internationally consistent, will use the best vocabulary to serve
the most people, and will at least support resource discovery for the 21st
century.
So, if you have been unable to recognise my position (!), folksonomies are
interesting, but controlled vocabularies (in the strictest sense) will
remain for many, many years! I'm certainly confident of that, even if Steve
Richardson isn't!
George
----------------------------------------------
George Macgregor,
Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR),
Department of Computer & Information Sciences,
University of Strathclyde, Livingstone Tower,
26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, UK, G1 1XH
tel: +44 (0)141 548 4753
web: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
--------------------------------------------
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The CETIS Metadata Special Interest Group [mailto:CETIS-
> METADATA@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Steve Richardson
> Sent: 05 May 2005 19:26
> To: CETIS-METADATA@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Do they mean metadata?!
>
> I have to say I am very pleased to see so many people finally coming
> round to this idea and that I again recommend that you read the paper
> Jay Dempster, Mark Childs and myself published a couple of years back in
> the Journal of Interactive Technology and Smart Education Volume 1
> Issue 2 paper 2 http://www.troubador.co.uk/
>
> For those of you who dont have access to this journal here are a few
> choice quotes:
>
> RESULTs made the decision early on to provide a dynamic peer driven
> system of classification of resources. This means that the users of
> RESULTs are responsible for the generation of the category tree and for
> the input of resources
>
> Importantly, and perhaps one of the most controversial features of
> RESULTs, the users contribution is unmoderated and appears
> instantaneously. By allowing users to create the category definitions,
> RESULTs effectively becomes a taxonomy creation tool; the users are
> generating the taxonomy themselves rather than having being restricted
> by a predefined, detailed classification. The category tree structure
> built up through this process is equates to the evolution of learning
> technology taxonomy.
>
> Multiple classifications for resources
>
> Users are empowered to make meaningful associations between resources as
> they relate to practice and to their own interests. The system provides
> facilities to copy/cut/ (Fig. 3) (and then to paste) resources to
> multiple locations around the category tree. On viewing the resource
> record (not shown), further facilities are provided to link resources
> held in different locations, as well as to shortlist resources to a
> personal collection (Dempster et al., 2003).
>
> In so doing, users are not creating new instances of a resource
> metadata; no new 'records' are produced. Instead, users are building up
> the pattern of relationships between resources as taxonpaths in the
> metadata. In some cases, these are for personal use (and it would not be
> difficult to create a personal 'worldview' as a subset of the whole, in
> others these are for the benefit of the community of practice.
>
>
> Please bear in mind that we STARTED with these ideas back in 2000/1
> thats 4/5 years ago and that this is just a small part of the work we
> did, we thought long and hard about all the issues involved, and were
> constrained by publishing restrictions.
>
> Obviously things have advanced since then and some of our findings have
> been undermined by ludicrous changes on the schemas, but the same
> principles hold,, and are even used in practice eg http://del.icio.us/
> now is perhaps the time to realise the mistakes of the past, learn from
> them, and as Sarah suggests see some more research done with these
> technologies.
>
> The only thing that I disagree with Sarah on is that this is small - I
> still believe this is the font of all things taxonomic - where else does
> taxonomy come from if not from ourselves and our interactions with
> others? this is the fundamental ethos behind knowledge sharing and
> common understanding - we only have meaning in our common view of the
> world - our communities! There are other very valid quality issues for
> sure, and I would certainly advocate a consensus of taxonomy derived
> from the whole community input; I believe librarians and information
> technologists have the extremely challenging role of developing
> imaginative and efficient ways of filtering and weighting the
> information contributed from the community at large in order to make
> these transitionally consenting dynamic taxonomies to be as useful as
> possible.
>
> One thing is certain - the days of mandated taxonomy, static systems and
> controlled vocabularies (in the strictest sense) are numbered!
>
> Excellent news
> All the best
> Steve
>
Posted by toreh at 09:39 EM
Mai 02, 2005
LOM Briefing
CETIS har laget et kort faktaark som gir en innføring i LOM-standarden.
Det kan være et greit startpunkt for den som undrer på hvordan IEEE-standarden står i forhold til IMS sin metadataspesifikasjon. Og som lurer på hvor en applikasjonsprofil (som norske NORLOM) passer inn i bildet.
Faktaarket peker også på hvordan LOM forholder seg til IMS VDEX (Vocabulary Definition and Exchange), til IMS QTI og til OAI-PMH (den mest utbredte protokollen for å høste metadata).
Posted by toreh at 09:57 EM
April 14, 2005
Automatisk generering av metadata
US Library of Congress har lagt fram en rapport som utforsker muligheten for å generer metadata automatisk når man lager nye digitale objekter. The Automatic Metadata Generation Applications (AMeGA) project peker på at dette er en problemstilling som bør følges opp. Eksisterende verktøy tar ikke høyde for mulighetene her - men at det selvsagt er mange skjær i sjøen :-)
Posted by toreh at 08:33 FM