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Digital Repositories - Overview
The term “Digital Repository” is used to describe a wide range of systems which provide the infrastructure for the storage, preservation, management, discovery and delivery of all types of electronic content. Common types of digital repository include Institutional Repositories - used by organisations such as Universities to store copies of scholarly works (either digitized or ‘born digital’)- and Digital Archives, where there is a strong emphasis on digital preservation.
Digital repositories of learning content are used to store assets and the metadata describing them. They may also store assets and metadata in different levels of aggregation. Although repositories provide a link between assets and metadata, they do not necessarily need to be stored in the same location.
There has recently been much effort to develop technologies that catalogue and facilitate the location of text, images, video and audio. Current efforts in the development of repository standards and software are broad and varied, with players coming from nearly every major sector. This diversity of interest has resulted in an impressive number of competing standards and supporting technologies.
The basic functionalities provided by a repository are described in the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information Systems (2002):- Data ingest: refers to the method of getting data into a repository and can include data push (publication or submission of data from a source into the repository) and data pull (harvesting or gathering of data initiated by a repository and acting on data sources).
- Data management: refers to the actions which take place within the repository. Although not exposed directly to repository users, the results of these actions are often visible (e.g. a high resolution image may be transformed into a lower resolution format for web based dissemination).
- Archival storage: refers to the technical infrastructure used for the storage and retrieval of assets and metadata. Where open standards are adopted for data ingest and providing access (search/ retrieval) then this should be transparent to users of the repository.
- Providing access: refers to the way in which the repository exposes its contents to end users (e.g. search/ browse interfaces).
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The IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability specification (only slightly more recent, being published in 2003) typically described repository functions as a number two-stage actions, the first performed by the user and the second by the repository: search/expose, gather/expose, submit/store, request/deliver, and alert/expose.
Since the publication of these early reference works, the main developments have included:
- the widespread adoption of OAI-PMH as a standard for exposing repositories for harvesting
- the development of open source repository management tools such as DSpace and Fedora
- the development of open source indexing tools such as Lucene and SOLR
- the growth on the use of ‘mash-ups’ and the subsequent growth in interest from developers in the use machine APIs for search and retrieval.
This section provides an overview of some key specifications and standards of particular interest to the eLearning community and provides links to news and events relating to digital repositories. |
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These contents have been obtained from the ADL official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the ADL Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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Advanced Distribute Learning Initiative
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Over the past 10 years, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative’s Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM®) evolved to provide a modular, object-based design approach for digital objects that solved key interoperability and reusability issues across many learning systems in industry and government. SCORM has enjoyed widespread international adoption, has become a de facto standard in many learning communities, and is supported by U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) policy. While SCORM advances the state of the art in designing and creating interoperable and reusable objects, it does not address finding and reusing objects after they have been created.
In 2003, ADL began work to solve this problem. ADL launched an investigation into the difficulties and realities of object creation, storage, and management and uncovered the limitations and problems encountered by others in related fields, such as library science, computer and network systems design, and publishing. As ADL investigated these fields and formulated high-level requirements for the learning community, it quickly found that many problems had not been solved by others and that the problem space was much more complex than it first appeared.
To address these issues, ADL set out to:- Define high-level requirements, policies, and business rules for object repositories that would be practical to implement.
- Identify and apply the most relevant technologies and specifications that could be used to define the architecture.
- Define an architecture on which necessary services could be built.
- Define an architecture that would be scalable.
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CORDRA (Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture) is an effort to define a framework for the federation of digital collections. The framework aka “CORDRA specification” is intended to be an open, standards-based model for designing and implementing information systems including registries and repositories for the purposes of discovery, sharing and reuse of information. The CORDRA specification will describe how owners or managers of widely distributed information expressed in digital form may register the existence of that information and so enable others to find and use that information.
CORDRA is designed to be an enabling model to bridge the worlds of learning content management and delivery, and content repositories and digital libraries. CORDRA aims to identify and specify (not develop) appropriate technologies and existing interoperability standards that can be combined into a reference model used to enable a learning content infrastructure.
Corporation for National Research Initiatives and Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative collaborated to design and implement a metadata registry, known as ADL Registry, to showcase and provide a reference implementation of the CORDRA specification (launched in December 2005, the ADL Registry is the first publicly available CORDRA implementation).ADL Registry Web |
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These contents have been obtained from the AICC Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the AICC Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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Aviation Industry CBT Committee
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The specification/guidelines Package Exchange Notification Services (PENS), developed by the AICC (CMI010), describes a protocol to support a notification service to announce the location of content package(s) that are available for transport. The intent is to automate the notification, transfer and delivery confirmation of content packages between tools or systems that generate content and systems that manage, publish or deliver content. |
Purpose and Scope
The purpose of this specification is to fill a gap that currently exists between the creation of content packages by “content authors” and the deployment of those content packages on LMSs by “LMS administrators” where learners may ultimately have access to them. Without a specification that addresses this gap, the concept of shared content is incomplete: LMSs do not have a means to obtain newly developed, revised or updated content.
The scope of the specification is specifically constrained to the notification request, package transfer and related responses. Specifically outside the scope of this specification are mechanisms for physical deployment of content packages, content management, version control, publication or revoca-tion of content.AICC Package Exchange Notification Services overview |
European Commitee for Standardization
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The Simple Publishing Interface (SPI) specification (CWA 16097:2010), partly sponsored by the CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies, defines a protocol for publishing learning objects and/or their metadata to digital repositories. This protocol facilitates transferring metadata and learning objects from tools that produce materials to applications that persistently manage learning objects and metadata, but is also applicable to the publication of a wider range of digital objects. A CEN Workshop Agreement containing the specification and a binding to the ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP), compatible with the SWORD profile which is widely used by institutional repositories, is due for publication in 2010.
The objective is to develop a practical approach towards interoperability between repositories for learning and applications that consume or produce educational materials. Examples of repositories for learning are educational brokers, knowledge pools, institutional repositories, streaming video servers, etc. Applications that consume these educational materials are for instance query and indexation tools, authoring tools, presentation programs, content packagers, etc. The work will concentrate on the development of the simple publishing interface (SPI), an interface for storing educational materials in a repository.
The design of the SPI API is based on the design principles of the Simple Query Interface (SQI) specification. It has been defined a simple set of commands that is extensible and flexible. By analogy with SQI, this protocol makes a distinction between semantic and syntactic interoperability:- Syntactic interoperability is the ability of applications to deal with the structure and format of data. For instance, a language such as XML Schema Description (XSD) ensures the syntactic interoperability of XML documents as it allows for the parsing and validation of these documents.
- Semantic interoperability refers to the ability of two parties to agree on the meaning of data or methods. When exchanging data, semantic interoperability is achieved when data is understood the same way by all the applications involved.
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Objectives
This publishing protocol meets the following objectives:- SPI enables integrating publishing into authoring environments. This is beneficial for the authors’ workflow, as they do not need to manually upload their learning objects using external publishing applications.
- SPI provides interoperability between applications that publish and applications that manage learning objects and metadata. Doing so, the effort of integrating publishing access into an authoring application can be reused on other learning object repositories, provided that they support SPI.
Simple Publishing Interface specification |
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These contents have been obtained from the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the CEN official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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European Commitee for Standardization
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The Simple Query Interface (SQI) specification, supported by CEN WS-LT (CWA 15454:2005), presents an Application Programming Interface (API) for querying learning object repositories. Since one major design objective is to keep the specification simple and easy to implement, the interface is labelled Simple Query Interface (SQI).
In the context of SQI, learning object repositories are defined as collections of educational material, courses, and learning objects with associated descriptions (referred to as “metadata”). Examples of repositories for learning are educational brokers, knowledge pools, streaming video servers, etc.
The collaborative effort of combining highly heterogeneous repositories has led to the following requirements:- SQI is neutral in terms of results format and query languages. The repositories connecting via SQI can be of highly heterogeneous nature, therefore, SQI makes no assumptions about the query language or results format.
- SQI supports Synchronous and Asynchronous Queries in order to allow application of the SQI specification in heterogeneous use cases.
- SQI supports, both, a stateful and a stateless implementation.
- SQI is based on a session management concept in order to separate authentication issues from query management.
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The design of the API itself is based on following design principles:- Command-Query Separation Principle,
- Simple Command Set and Extensibility.
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| SQI forms a key part of the infrastructure used by the ASPECT project. ASPECT will also develop mappings from SQI to other search specifications including SRU.Simple Query Interface specification |
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These contents have been obtained from the IMS Global Learning Consortium official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS Global Learning Consortium official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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IMS Global Learning Consortium
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The purpose of the Digital Repositories Interoperability (DRI) specification, developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, is to provide recommendations for the interoperation of the most common repository functions. These recommendations should be implementable across services to enable them to present a common interface.
On the broadest level, this specification defines digital repositories as being any collection of resources that are accessible via a network without prior knowledge of the structure of the collection. Repositories may hold actual assets or the meta-data that describe assets. The assets and their meta-data do not need to be held in the same repository.IMS Digital Repositories Web Page |
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These contents have been obtained from the IMS Global Learning Consortium official Web site and edited for presentation. Please refer to the IMS Global Learning Consortium official Web site for additional information on terms of use.
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IML Global Learning Consortium
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The Learning Object Discovery & Exchange (LODE) activity in IMS GLC is tasked with facilitating the discovery and retrieval of learning content stored in repositories. The “exchange” requirement centers on the fact that, while learning content repositories already cater for their local users, there are no agreed profiles that address the needs of the learning domain, and no established practices for combining existing specifications into complete solutions. Individual organizations are creating their own solutions, with quite different technical strategies, policy apparatus, and metadata schemes, and an opportunity to establish broader interoperability is being missed. There is also no way of measuring or testing the compatibility and conformance of specific solutions.
The following are considered in scope for the activity:- Search protocol, search query, and search results (i.e., metadata)
- Metadata harvesting
- Application of identifiers
- Collection and service description
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The following areas are considered out of scope of this activity:- Authentication, authorization, access (unless it is part of a specific protocol)
- Digital Rights Management
- Identity management
- Metadata application profiling
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| Interoperability will be demonstrated when a system (e.g., a LMS) end user is able to discover a compatible learning object (e.g., a common cartridge) hosted on a separate system (e.g., a learning object repository) using a LODE-compliant discovery service. Demonstrations will focus on federated discovery (through either federated search or harvest-driven centralized search), as these present the greater interoperability challenge. The federations should be based on LODE search and LODE registry specifications. However LODE does not require federation for compliance. “Federated” is used in a loose sense to refer to a group of distributed, independently managed and potentially heterogeneous repositories, whether or not any agreements, trust relationships etc. exist between them.IMS LODE Web Site |
| This category includes a number of specifications and recommendations related to the digital repositories area which either are not targeted specifically to the learning technologies field either have been developed by institutions not specifically focused to defining standards. |
OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
Open Archives Initiative
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The OAI-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), supported by the Open Archives Initiative, defines a mechanism for harvesting records containing metadata from repositories. The OAI-PMH gives a simple technical option for data providers to make their metadata available to services, based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The metadata that is harvested may be in any format that is agreed by a community (or by any discrete set of data and service providers), although unqualified Dublin Core is specified to provide a basic level of interoperability. Thus, metadata from many sources can be gathered together in one database, and services can be provided based on this centrally harvested, or "aggregated" data. The link between this metadata and the related content is not defined by the OAI protocol. It is important to realise that OAI-PMH does not provide a search across this data, it simply makes it possible to bring the data together in one place. In order to provide services, the harvesting approach must be combined with other mechanisms.OAI-PMH Project Web Site |
Z39.50 Protocol
"Z39.50" refers to the International Standard, ISO 23950: "Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification", and to ANSI/NISO Z39.50. The standard specifies a client/server-based protocol for searching and retrieving information from remote databases.
Z39.50 makes it easier to use large information databases by standardizing the procedures and features for searching and retrieving information. Specifically, Z39.50 supports information retrieval in a distributed, client and server environment where a computer operating as a client submits a search request (i.e., a query) to another computer acting as an information server. Software on the server performs a search on one or more databases and creates a result set of records that meet the criteria of the search request. The server returns records from the result set to the client for processing. The power of Z39.50 is that it separates the user interface on the client side from the information servers, search engines, and databases. Z39.50 provides a consistent view of information from a wide variety of sources, and it offers client implementors the capability to integrate information from a range of databases and servers.Z39.50 Protocol |
Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU)
SRU is a search and retrieval protocol that uses Internet and web facilities to carry the messages between user and target. It was defined by the defined by the U.S. Library of Congress on the basis of the Z39.50 protocol, a very widely implemented globally specification. Much of the functionality of SRU is derived from the older protocol, however, only the most useful was brought over, and in a simplified form. At the time that SRU development began, similar search use of the URL was under investigation in several institutions, notably by staff at the Royal Library in the Netherlands. An international group of experts from the Z39.50 community collaborated on a draft of this new protocol for the Internet/web/XML environment. The SRU specifications were first published in 2002 and have been popular for use in new applications because of the ease of implementation.
SRU is very flexible. It is XML-based and the most common implementation is SRU via URL, which uses the HTTP GET for message transfer. Other versions, however, can be run over the web's SOAP protocol (SRU via SOAP), which supports more web service features, and over HTTP POST (SRU via POST), which avoids some length and character set restrictions that are currently present with HTTP GET. The records returned in response to a search may be in any well-defined XML format.Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU) |
OpenSearch
The web is a big place, and search engines that crawl the surface of the web are picking up only a small fraction of the great content that is out there. Moreover, some of the richest and most interesting content can not even be crawled and indexed by one search engine or navigated by one relevancy algorithm alone. Different types of content require different types of search engines. The best search engine for a particular type of content is frequently the search engine written by the people that know the content the best.
OpenSearch is a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results. The OpenSearch description document format can be used to describe a search engine so that it can be used by search client applications. The OpenSearch response elements can be used to extend existing syndication formats, such as RSS and Atom, with the extra metadata needed to return search results.
OpenSearch was created by A9.com, an Amazon.com company, and the OpenSearch format is now in use by hundreds of search engines and search applications around the Internet. The OpenSearch specification is made available according to the terms of a Creative Commons license so that everyone can participate. OpenSearch Web Site |
Contextual Query Language (CQL)
CQL, the Contextual Query Language, defined by the U.S. Library of Congress, is a formal language for representing queries to information retrieval systems such as web indexes, bibliographic catalogs and museum collection information. The design objective is that queries be human readable and writable, and that the language be intuitive while maintaining the expressiveness of more complex languages.
Traditionally, query languages have fallen into two camps: Powerful, expressive languages, not easily readable nor writable by non-experts (e.g. SQL, PQF, and XQuery);or simple and intuitive languages not powerful enough to express complex concepts (e.g. CCL and google). CQL tries to combine simplicity and intuitiveness of expression for simple, every day queries, with the richness of more expressive languages to accomodate complex concepts when necessary.CQL Specification Web Site |
ProLearn Query Language (PLQL)
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The ProLearn Query Language (PLQL), developed by the PROLEARN "Network of Excellence", is a query language for repositories of learning objects. PLQL is primarily a query interchange format, used by source applications (or PLQL clients) for querying repositories (or PLQL servers). PLQL has been designed with the goal of effectively supporting search over LOM, DC and MPEG-7 metadata. However, PLQL does not assume or require these metadata standards.
PLQL is based on existing language paradigms (like the Contextual Query Language - CQL), and aims to minimize the need for introducing new concepts. Given that an XML binding is available for all relevant metadata standards for learning objects, it was decided to express exact search by using query paths on hierarchies, borrowing concepts from XPath. Thus, PLQL combines two of the most popular query paradigms, allowing its implementations to re-use existing technology from both fields: approximate search (using information retrieval engines such as Lucene) and exact search (using XML-based query engines).PLQL Specification |
ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop - Presentations available!
( 25/06/2010 ) |
| The European Schoolnet's Learning Resource Exchange and the ASPECT Best Practice Network organised a two-day workshop at the EUN Office in Brussels on 15 and 16 June 2010 The ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop was conducted in two parts. During the first part, each participant presented their repository infrastructure and the metadata scheme used to describe their digital resource collections.
During the second part of the workshop, interoperability tools and techniques were demonstrated and tested as an introduction to a discussion aimed at elaborating a plan for actually connecting the participating repositories’ infrastructures. more information |
E-learning and collaboration in The Netherlands
( 26/04/2010 ) |
Dr Peter Bloemendaal from Leiden University Medical School talks about Medicaleducation.nl, an online e-learning resources for medical students in The Netherlands
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This websites facilitates the distribution and sharing of medical resources. As Peter explains: “We started the project about five years ago, and now we have more than 1200 e-learning modules in our database.”
These resources are freely available to those in the medical community. This resource is managed via a distributive administration system.
“Every university medical centre has its own administrators, and can put their own e-learning tools into the database,” says Peter. “These resources are then distributed to the university students, or all medical students in The Netherlands.”
Using this system, students have access to a wide range of information. “Before, students only had access to their institutions. But now they have access to resources from all eight of our medical centres,” he says.
This collaborative effort is hugely popular, and continues to grow. “We have more than 25,000 users in the database, and we’re seeing an increase in the usage from last year,” says Peter.
One valuable advantage of this system is that medical educators can analyse any trends in how students use the e-learning resources, and students are also given the opportunity to leave comments and feedback. As Peter explains: “We can use this system to see what students are doing with their el-earning tools, and you can also look at what grades they got with the different tools.” Clearly this system can be used to help medical educators continuously improve their e-learning resources.
Peter is enthusiastic about other collaborative e-learning programmes, including eViP. When asked if he would use eViP virtual patients, the answer was a resounding yes! “I would very much like to see eViP in medical education,” he says. “That would be great because all the eViP cases could be distributed throughout The Netherlands.”
more information |
JISC joins the Confederation of Open Access Repositories
( 31/10/2009 ) |
JISC has become a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), joining those representing the UK
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Taking inspiration from the European DRIVER1 repositories project, which helps to enhance repository development, COAR takes this vision to an international scale; founding members of the Confederation include members from North America, China and Japan, as well as Europe.
The aim of COAR is to ‘enhance and progress the provision, visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access repositories,’ which also fits with JISC’s work to show the benefit to researchers of using repositories.
Neil Jacobs JISC’s programme manager for digital repositories says, “JISC’s work over the past few years in encouraging the growth of institutional repositories means that the UK now has a virtually unparalleled network of repositories that covers almost all of the research-base of UK higher education.
“Joining COAR at the early stage of its development means members will be able to contribute to shaping the organisation’s objectives which will look at interoperability, raising awareness and promoting Open Access repositories, supporting the repository community and working with partners in closely related fields such as research management and publishing.”
Open Access repositories offer researchers and universities the chance to significantly increase the impact of their research outputs, with the potential for significant benefits for UK higher education and the economy and society more widely.
more information |
First version of ICOPER Open Content Spaces published
( 08/03/2009 ) |
The first report on the Open ICOPER Content Space Implementation of 1st Generation of Open ICOPER Content Space is delivered, including Integration Mini Case Studies
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| ICOPER Best Practice Network |
In the context of the ICOPER project, the Open ICOPER content space (OICS) has been defined as the umbrella combining a portfolio of interoperable repositories, content and tools, as a test bed for the specifications and standards that become part of the ICOPER reference model. The use cases that the OICS will support emerge from the collaboration of all work packages. After fruitful discussions between all partners of work package 1, it was decided to conceive the first generation of the OICS as a meta-repository providing search functionality. Technologically, it would be based on metadata harvesting and provide a simple search interface for querying this metadata. This should build the foundation for the implementation of more sophisticated use cases that are currently collected by work package leaders, and are analyzed under the supervision of WP7. These use cases serve as concrete inputs for the future development of OICS.more information |
EdReNE State of the Art of Educational Repositories in Europe
( 29/01/2009 ) |
Current state of educational repositories – national overview
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| EdReNe – Educational Repositories Network |
To make it easier for teachers and students to find the best relevant learning resources, authorities and/or companies in many countries have launched web based educational repositories.
According to Wikipedia, A repository is a place where data are stored and maintained. A repository can be
- a place where data are stored
- a place where specifically digital data are stored
- a site where eprints are located
- a place where multiple databases or files are located for distribution over a network,
- a computer location that is directly accessible to the user without having to travel across a network.
- a place where anything is stored for probable reuse
- a place to store digital data
The variaty in educational reposities across Europe reflects this situation. They are all web based. However, some repositories are merely catalogues of learning resources. They only contain descriptions of the learning content.
Some repositories contain both content and a brief description of each title, meaning they have both data (the learning resource itself) and metadata (a description of the resource).
The resources can be any type of content from ‘traditional’ texts books to digital materials, but most countries focus on digital learning resources in order to encourage the teachers’ uptake of modern materials and learning styles.
And it is certainly the case that the approaches taken by the various European countries differ. However, alle countries share the objective of making resources available and visible to the users, and face the same challenges of e.g. reaching many users, managing rights and adopting standards.
This report summarises the current status of educational repositories in Europe, and it extracts the issues that EdReNe members have raised as a basis for discussions and collaboration in the EdReNe networks first years.
Revised: 2009-01-29. All rights reserved. Copyright EdReNe © 2009.State of the art report - II |
ASPECT Workshop
LRE Technical & Semantic InteroperabilityBrussels, Belgium - From 15/06/2010 to 16/06/2010 |
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The European Schoolnet Learning Resource Exchange and the ASPECT Best Practice Network are inviting a small number of key organizations to a two-day workshop at the EUN Office in Brussels on 15 and 16 June 2010.
The ASPECT LRE Technical & Semantic Interoperability Workshop will be conducted in two parts. During the first part, each participant will present their repository infrastructure and the metadata scheme used to describe their digital resource collections. Each presentation will be followed by a discussion focusing on the interoperability problems that, according to the other participants, need to be addressed in order for them to access the presented collection. During the second part of the workshop, interoperability tools and techniques will be presented, demonstrated, and possibly tested as an introduction to a discussion aimed at elaborating a plan for actually connecting the participating repositories’ infrastructures.
The workshop is intended for developers, repository administrators, and technical and semantic interoperability specialists of the represented organizations.
There is a limited number of seats for this event and thus registration will be on a first come, first served basis.
If you are interested in attending, please contact Dr. Elena Shulman (elena.shulman@eun.org).
ASPECT Workshop |
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EdReNe Strategic Seminar
4th Strategic Seminar on Repositories of Learning ResourcesBarcelona, Spain - From 24/03/2010 to 26/03/2010 |
The EdReNe thematic network invites members and interested stakeholders to the network’s 4th strategic seminar on repositories of learning resources.
The seminar will explore EdReNe’s overall themes: which repository strategies work, how do we engage users and producers, which are the relevant standards to ensure interoperability, and how do members address the complex handling of intellectual property rights. The presentations and debate will eventually lead to a number of recommendations on these issues from the EdReNe network.
more information |
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3rd EdReNe expert workshop
Engaging users and producersLinz, Austria - From 18/11/2009 to 20/11/2009 |
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| Educational Repositories Network |
The expert workshop is the third and final in the series on engaging users and producers (see
references below). However, new members and stakeholders may also benefit from jumping into
the network’s exchange of experiences.
Engagement of users and producers can be addressed in many ways.
The agenda of the workshop will be finalized in an iterative process on the basis of suggestions and contributions by the members and external experts. At previous events members prioritized a list of possible models/solutions, which can be explored further in EdReNe:
- Content/information could be presented based on user profiling and personalization. Before the workshops the members should prepare user profiles of teachers with the relevant characteristics, e.g. front-runner (early adaptors), normal teacher, etc.
- User involvement: Set up user groups and listen to their needs; let them influence the development; keep users as close as possible. Inspiration and experiences could be acquired by inviting teachers from the eduhi.at project to the final workshop. The teachers should present their needs and working practices regarding repositories.
- “Being where the customers are”:
- What can we learn from social networks? How can repository content be present in social networks (to attract new and active users)? An expert of social networks could be invited to the workshop.
- Investigate how repository functions could be used from within a VLE or other it- systems where the teacher has to be on a daily basis. Invite VLE-experts to explain and discuss their vision on 'user engagement'.
- How do we get users to come back, to stay and to use the repository? Can we learn from internet marketing? An expert could be invited. The differences in culture across Europe should be kept in mind.
Workshop 1, engaging users and producers: http://edrene.org/workshops/engagement/ws5-1.html
Workshop 2, engaging users and producers: http://edrene.org/workshops/engagement/ws5-2.html
Strategic seminar 3, looking ahead: http://edrene.org/seminars/seminar3stockholm.html
Workshop Website |
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SE@M 2009 The 3rd international workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials
Making content standards work for you!Hotel Benczúr, Budapest - From 04/11/2009 to 05/11/2009 |
CONTEXT
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Creating good, pedagogically sound and effective learning resources incurs substantial costs, so avoiding duplication of development efforts is important. The community working in the field of learning technologies has been and is still dedicating a lot of energy to the creation of better and more reusable learning resources. Some of these efforts in the sphere of reusability have matured enough to lead to the creation of standards such as the IEEE Learning Object Metadata, the IMS Content Package, or the IMS Common Cartridge. Nowadays, the number of reusable educational resources available online, for free or by subscription, is huge but most of these resources are “hidden” in repositories and cannot be easily found, hampering their potential use and reuse.
Over the past few years, researchers and practitioners have started to address these issues. Several initiatives worldwide (such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange, ARIADNE, and GLOBE) are developing solutions for federating e-learning systems and unlocking the educational content hidden in repositories. Started last year, the work of the IMS Group on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange aims at supporting these initiatives by developing a set of specifications that facilitate the discovery and retrieval of distributed learning resources.
The main goals of the international workshop on search and exchange of e-learning materials are to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the field of learning resource retrieval, facilitate the exchange between them and foster future collaborations. It aims at offering a forum where these researchers and practitioners can discuss theoretical aspects, open issues, and innovative approaches and share the latest advances in the state of the art and practices for discovering and exchanging learning content.
One day of the workshop will be especially aimed at publishers and professionals with the objective to understand how existing and emerging standards can best be applied and combined to improve content interoperability and how to test the compliance of contents against a range of standards. A special focus will be put on the latest outcomes of the ASPECT partnership (http://aspect-project.org).
NB: this workshop is part of a series of workshops that are run by the ASPECT partnership. If you cannot attend SE@M 2009, but you would like to receive updates on future workshops, plugfests etc., please register on the ASPECT website: http://aspect-project.org.
PARTICIPANTS
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SE@M 2009, aims at bringing together researchers and professionals working with learning resources publication and delivery —publishers of learning resources and technologies, managers of learning infrastructures and learning resource repositories, learning professionals and practitioners.
CALENDAR
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Call for contributions deadline: 20 OCTOBER, 2009
- Extended abstract submission: 15 October, 2009
- Notification of acceptance to presenters: 20 October, 2009
- Workshop date: 4-5 November 2009
- Camera ready revised abstracts: 15 November 2009
TOPICS OF INTEREST (include but are not limited to)
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Interoperable Content
- Interoperable content format: Limitations of current standards, new developments
- Conformance testing, quality control and validation
- Tools
- New developments
- Profiling, validation and conformance testing
- Controlled vocabularies and their management
- Automatic metadata generation
- Automatic metadata translation
- Learning object identity
Infrastructures For Learning Resource Discovery And Exchange
- Architectures for content discovery and exchange
- Interoperable content and metadata repositories
- Protocols for exposing content
- Federations of learning resources
- Service registries
Rich Description of Resources
- Metadata
- Standards and application profiles
- Automatic metadata generation versus human indexing
- Intellectual property and metadata
- Controlled vocabularies and their management
- Mapping and crosswalks between metadata standards
- Metadata profiling and conformance testing
Discovering Content
- User profiling for more accurate resource discovery
- Retrieval of learning resources (searching, browsing)
- Content aggregation
- Interoperable query languages
- Harvesting versus federated searching
- Enhanced search mechanism (sorting, ranking)
- Inclusion of other type of content (library, cultural heritage)
- Recommendation systems
- Quality aspects
Exchanging Content
- Resource identification
- Open content and reusable resource licensing
- Reliable auditing (tracking, reporting)
- Access control, licensing and content protection
- WEB-2.0 approaches (e.g., folksonomies, content syndication)
- Semantic web approaches
SUBMISSION
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Authors are invited to submit extended abstract (2 to 4 pages) of original unpublished research or work-in-progress. All submitted abstracts will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality.
All extended abstracts should be submitted via the workshop's Web site at easychair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sem09
Accepted submissions will be published online as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073.
Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs). For camera-ready format instructions, please see “For Authors“ instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
Questions can be addressed to: seam@eun.org
ORGANISERS
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David Massart, European Schoolnet (EUN), Belgium
Serge Ravet, EIfEL, France
The workshops is organised by the ASPECT initiative
PROGRAM COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)
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- Vladimir Batagelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Jean-Noël Colin, FUNDP, Belgium
- Ingo Dahn, Koblenz University, Germany
- Erik Duval, KUL, Belgium
- Manuel Kolp, UCL, Belgium
- Joris Klerkx, KUL, Belgium
- Robert Kristofl, BMUKK, Austria
- Eugenijus Kurilovas, SMM, Lithuania
- Tien-Dung Le, European Schoolnet, Belgium
- Jon Mason, InterCog, Australia
- Fredrik Paulsson, Umeå University, Sweden
- Tomasz Orzechowski, AGH, Poland
- Alain Pirotte, UCL, Belgium
- Daniel Rehak, Learning Systems Architecture Lab and Daniel Rehak Consulting LLC, USA
- Jan Pawlowski, JYU, Finland
- Griff Richards, SFU, Canada
- Bernd Simon, WU-Wien, Austria
- Stefaan Ternier, Open Universiteit, The Netherlands
- Tsuneo Yamada, Open University, Japan
ASPECT Web site |
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Repository Strategies Workshop
EdReNe thematic network: Repository strategies - third expert workshop (WS 3.3)Sestri Levante, Italy - From 17/09/2009 to 18/09/2009 |
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Sestri Levante, Italy, September 17th – 18th 2009
The EdReNe thematic network invites members and interested stakeholders to the network’s 3rd expert workshop on repository strategies.
AGENDA:
Thursday, September 17th 2009
9.30 Welcome to Sestri Levante. Introduction
9.45 Educational repositories in perspective. BBC’s Archive strategy?
11.00 Summing up from the strategic seminar in Stockholm
11.30 Current status of European Educational Repositories. Hot News from everybody
12.00 Group session: Current status of EdReNe and European Educational Re-positories
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Publisher strategies
15.00 Coffee break
15.30 Presentation of new members
16.00 The EdReNe White Paper. Plenum and group sessions
18.00 First day finishes
20.00 Workshop Dinner
Friday, September 18th 2009
09.00 Administrative issues and project update
09.30
Learning repositories quality evaluation and improvement tools
Content packaging application profile for education
Promoting an ecosystem for the discovery, delivery and sharing of digital learning resources’
SMART technologies continued.
Other contributions
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Group session: EdReNe synthesis reports
15.30 Coffee break
16.00 Further planning:
16.30 Evaluation
17.00 Seminar finishesmore information |
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