News and Views
Issue 3
May 17, 2002
Welcome to “News and Views” Issue 3
As with the first two issues, we are emailing this newsletter to individuals and groups who we
hope will find value in the information it provides. Please forward this newsletter to other
interested individuals and to relevant email distribution lists.
In this issue, we announce the availability of The CommonPlace web site
(www.theCommonPlace.net), a place for all those involved in e-learning to share information.
The News and Views newsletter is one user of The CommonPlace. Join us there to provide
feedback, make suggestions, and share information.
This newsletter is currently being published every 3 weeks. If you have suggestions that will
make the newsletter more useful for you, please let us know what they are. To have News and
Views e-mailed directly to you, to make comments, submit articles, or suggest topics, go to
www.theCommonPlace.net, or send email to NewsAndViews@theCommonPlace.net. To see an
archive of all of articles or to download prior issues of News and Views, go to
www.theCommonPlace.net/articles.cfm.
News and Views welcomes contributions of articles that are short, accurate and informative.
Geoff Collier & Robby Robson, Editors
In this Issue:
June 2002 E-learning Calendar - E-learning events happening in the month of June.
The CommonPlace - A Place for E-learning - The CommonPlace web site is up. So what?
CanCore Puts Meta-data into Practice – CanCore has developed a set of guidelines for using
meta-data to catalog, discover and share educational objects, built on the IMS Meta-data
specification.
Making Meta-data Practical – Now that meta-data standards are available, how do you make use of
them in the real world? This article points to guidelines and existing implementations.
Taking Advantage of RDF - A recent workshop showed how RDF can be used to combine multiple
catalog records into a single, richer record. Links to RDF tools are also provided.
June 2002 E-learning Calendar
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ASTD 2002 International Conference & Exposition, June 2 - 6, New Orleans, Louisiana.
www.astd.org/astd2002

IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee Meeting, June 18 - 20, Seattle, Washington.
ltsc.ieee.org/index.html#meetings

Ed-Media World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Telecommunications,
June 24 - 29, Denver, Colorado. www.aace.org/conf/edmedia

Aviation Industry CBT Committee General Meeting, June 24 - 28, Vienna, Austria.
www.aicc.org/pages/announce.htm
The E-learning calendar lists selected conferences, expositions, and seminars that are open to the
public. Vendor user conferences are not listed.
Disclaimer: The content of this publication represents the opinions of the authors and editors. Accuracy,
completeness, and interpretation are not guaranteed. The opinions expressed do not constitute endorsements,
recommendations, or attempts to sell any product, service, or course of action.
News and Views
News and Views
Issue 3
May 17, 2002
The CommonPlace - A Place for E-learning
The CommonPlace web site (www.theCommonPlace.net) became available April 30, 2002. The
CommonPlace is a place to exchange information, ask questions, and find people and resources.
The Commonplace is free for all to use. Its future depends on participants for input, direction,
and content.
To get things started, there are three forums on the site (www.theCommonPlace.net/forum):



Real world examples of e-learning standards in use- Come to this forum to share
information on your implementation of e-learning standards, and to ask what others
are doing.
Working e-learning products and reference sites - This forum is the place to share
and find information about e-learning products and working implementations.
News and Views - On this forum, criticize or praise the articles, provide your
thoughts on e-learning, or discuss the implications of the information in the articles.
These initial forums were based on suggestions from the News and Views audience. You can use
the web site to suggest others.
There is just a small amount of content on The CommonPlace consisting of back articles and
references from News and Views, and some links to e-learning sites. Please feel free to suggest
other material or sites.
The CommonPlace is a place to find and communicate with those who create, acquire or
implement e-learning technology. It will evolve in response to your participation and your input.
Developers may want to exchange code or talk about best practice. Consumers might like to see
each other’s reviews of products. The CommonPlace welcomes contributions and places no up
front restrictions on what suggestions will be considered.
“There have been many calls for an open means of communication among the communities of
use for e-learning technology." According to Ed Walker of IMS, “The CommonPlace is an
experiment to test whether the time for doing so is right. IMS provided initial support for The
CommonPlace. If it is used, and other organizations help support it, The CommonPlace will
continue to be available to the world-wide community of practice.”
Please have a look at www.theCommonPlace.net. Give us your opinion, good or bad. Your
feedback will determine what happens on and to The CommonPlace.
News and Views
News and Views
Issue 3
May 17, 2002
CanCore Puts Meta-data into Practice
Norm Friesen, Information Architect, CanCore (www.cancore.org)
Meta-data allows digital educational resources to be properly cataloged and effectively searched.
Putting meta-data into practice, especially for large collections of content, requires clear
standards that define the structure of the meta-data elements and the rules for populating these
elements when tagging a resource. Global meta-data specifications provided by organizations
like IMS and the Dublin Core provide a structure, but do not specify precisely which elements
must be populated, nor what values are allowed in these elements.
To help address this gap, a group of Canadian educators have been developing guidelines known
as CanCore, which are based on a subset of the IMS Meta-data elements. The CanCore
guidelines are intended to facilitate the cataloging, discovery and sharing of education resources
in Canada and around the world. CanCore has been adopted by a number of repository
projects, including POOL/Splash (Portal for Online Objects in Learning - www.edusplash.net),
CAREO (Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects - www.careo.org) and
BELLE/Alexandria (Broadband Enabled Lifelong Learning Environment - www.netera.ca/belle
and alexandria.netera.ca).
"Like SCORM, we're focusing on the most useful elements for interoperability in IMS Meta-data,
but at the same time, we're also documenting best practices for their use." explains Anthony
Robert, Manager of Telecampus (telecampus.edu). "This is not a new specification or standard,"
according to Roberts. "It's an attempt to bridge the gap between the generalities, ambiguities and
choices left open by the IMS specification and the particular needs of implementers."
The CanCore team includes experts from Athabasca University (Canada's Open University), the
Electronic Text Centre at University of New Brunswick, and TeleEducation New Brunswick.
Support is being provided by a wide variety of industry, academic, and government
organizations, including Alberta Learning and Industry Canada.
CanCore is currently releasing draft chapters of its guidelines document for public comment.
Each chapter addresses a particular element group in the IMS Meta-data specification, and
provides: refinements of definitions; discussions of best practice; vocabulary recommendations
and definitions; multiple XML-encoded and plain language examples; and technical
implementation notes.
Draft guidelines are freely available from the CanCore Website at www.cancore.org. Comments
and questions can be directed to Norm Friesen (norm.friesen@ualberta.ca) or Anthony Roberts
(aroberts@nbnet.nb.ca).
News and Views
News and Views
Issue 3
May 17, 2002
Making Meta-data Practical
Robby Robson, Eduworks Corporation (www.eduworks.com)
In August of 2001, key participants from several meta-data initiatives met in Ottawa, Canada,
and agreed to a series of steps intended to make it easier to understand and use meta-data. The
first of these steps was an article entitled Metadata Principles and Practicalities that has just
appeared (www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/weibel/04weibel.html).
At the heart of this effort is the interplay between general frameworks for cataloging and finding
learning resources and the specific needs of an organization or community. These needs are
often served by using multiple meta-data frameworks but also involve developing specific
descriptive elements and vocabularies for local use. Expository material, best practice guides,
and concrete examples all can help understand how this is done.
While Metadata Principles and Practicalities is expository, projects like CanCore (see Norm
Friesen's article in this issue) provide best practice guides and examples. More examples of
meta-data in action are available from the UK Office for Library and Information Networking
(www.ukoln.ac.uk/).
Further examples of applied meta-data have been kindly provided by Cisco Systems
(www.thecommonplace.net/add/Cisco_metadata_spec.pdf) and the Center for Educational and
Training Technology at Mississippi State University
(www.thecommonplace.net/add/ICADTaxonomyv1p2-public.pdf). These documents describe
how the two organizations use meta-data for their own purposes. Their implementations
demonstrate how to create meta-data for local use and how local variants mesh with
standardized approaches so that internal requirements and interoperability requirements can be
simultaneously addressed.
The work launched in Ottawa, projects like CanCore, services provided by organizations like the
UK Office for Library and Information Networking, and examples like those provided by Cisco
Systems and Mississippi State University are playing a crucial role in making meta-data
practical.
News and Views
News and Views
Issue 3
May 17, 2002
Taking Advantage of RDF
Liddy Nevile, Director of Motile Research (www.motile.net)
At the Museums on the Web 2002 Conference (www.archimuse.com/mw2002), Eric Miller and
Ralph Swick conducted a mini-workshop on how museums can take advantage of the World
Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework, better known simply as RDF. The
slides for their presentation are available at http://www.w3.org/Talks/2002/04/19-rdf/.
Part of their presentation involved a demonstration that brought together a variety of catalog
records from the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) (www.amico.org) collection in order to
provide a richer catalog record. In the demonstration, two records were selected. One was a
record that showed an image from the AMICO collection and the meta-data associated to the
image by AMICO. The other was a library style record that referred to information about the
artist of the original painting. The result was a new record that revealed both sets of information
meaningfully combined.
For those inclined to try RDF out themselves, several tools are available for authoring and using
RDF. Among these are:
1
The Redfoot RDF framework (redfoot.sourceforge.net) provides a system for building
distributed data-driven web applications with RDF and Python. It includes an RDF
database, query API, template language, module architecture, editor all with web
interface, sample applications and the beginnings of Peer To Peer support.
2
The Jena Java RDF API and toolkit (www.hpl.hp.com/semweb) is a comprehensive Java
system. Jena contains an API for manipulating RDF models (including statement and
resource-centric methods using cascading calls for easy object orientated use), container
support, the ARP RDF/XML parser, an RDF/XML writer, the RDQL query language,
DAML support, and persistent storage.
3
IsaViz (www.w3.org/2001/11/IsaViz) is a visual authoring tool for browsing and
authoring RDF models represented as graphs. IsaViz is based on the Xerox Visual
Transformation Machine.
Other tools can be accessed from the W3C RDF tools page (www.w3.org/rdf).
RDF was designed to enable Web resources to be linked in ways based on meaning, not just
location. The AMICO demonstration shows that RDF makes it is possible to sensibly combine
two descriptions of the same object. This could be crucial in situations where learning objects
have multiple meta-data records because they are used and cataloged in multiple ways from
multiple perspectives.
News and Views