4th September 2003, London

The following report is from the 4th September 2003 UK eUniversities Worldwide Metadata and Digital Repository SIG Meeting, held in London.

A list of attendees is given at the end of this report.

CETIS update
Phil Barker gave an introduction to the aims of CETIS and the Metadat SIG, and an update on CETIS's funding and the other SIGs.

For more details, see Phil's slides [62KB].

Sarah Currier, coordinator of the CETIS Educational Content SIG (EC SIG), announced that the EC SIG is publishing a series of "briefing papers", providing introductory explanations of the specifications covered by that SIG. These are available from the Educational Content SIG website.

IMS Update
Phil Barker gave an update on the current activities of the IMS groups of relevance to this SIG, including:
 * Realignment of IMS Learning Resource Meta-data with IEEE 1484.12 Learning Object Metadata.
 * IMS Resources List Interoperability.
 * [IMS VDEX was covered in the afternoon].

The discussion afterwards raised two salient points:
 * There's a problem, that we are stuck with, concerning how to deal with current implementations of IEEE LOM metadata which use the older IMS XML binding
 * RLI should be made to be consistent with RSS.

Lorna Campbell gave an update on work starting between IMS, IEEE and DCMI looking at ways which these bodies can work together. Her powerpoint presentation (61kB) is available. It was stressed that the LOM would be stable as a standard for at least 5 years, and that work such as this, looking into how it might develop, should not put people off using it.

For more details, see Phil's slides [52KB] and Lorna's slides [61KB].

BS8419
Lorna gave a brief notice on the progress towards BS8419, which aims to describe best practice for organisations writing metadata application profiles and cross-walks.

For more details, see Lorna's slides [62KB].

UK LOM Core (and Learning Resource Type Vocabulary)
Lorna also gave an update on the UK LOM Core, an application profile of the IEEE LOM for UK use. Draft 0.1 has bee circulated, and adopted as the basis for several implementations of the LOM. Lorna is working on the next revision, which will not contain any substantial changes.

The same presentation also reports on work by the RDN and LTSN to develop a shared vocabulary scheme for resource types which may form the basis of a recommendation for the UK LOM Core.

Other issues raised include the use of identifiers, XML binding, and the role that this SIG could play in keeping a record of who is using which elements from the LOM.

For more details, see Lorna's slides [82KB].

Report on the Identifiers Meeting
Phil gave a report on the SIG Identifiers Meeting.

IMS VDEX, and VDEX Editor
Phil gave an overview of the the new IMS VDEX specification which allows the encoding and exchange of controlled vocabularies. He also gave an overview of work which Tina is doing to integrate VDEX into a metadata editor.

For more details, see Phil's slides [68KB].

In discussion of this, Andy Powell asked whether this new specification could do anything which couldn't be done with the existing specifications for encoding vocabularies, such as Zthes or XML Topic Maps (XTM) (and many others).

Quality Assurance for Metadata Creation
Sarah Currier presented a summary of a paper she has co-authored and will be presenting at the Dublin Core conference in Seattle in October. Another paper form Sarah on the subject is available on this site, as is Sarah's powerpoint presentation (2.84MB).

For more details, see another paper from Sarah [88KB] and Sarah's slides [2.84MB].

Attendees
The following people registered for the meeting.

Many thanks to all who attended, especially those who gave presentations and those at London who helped with the organisation.