The role of standards bodies in metadata is mentioned, and please note that we now have a reconstituted Standards Australia Information Technology (IT-019) committee with wider representation which considers these and other standards issues.

Please contact Evan Bailey, Metadata and Standards Officer, Learning Services NSW Curriculum and Learning Innovation Centre. T: +61 2 9715 8130 E: evan.bailey@det.nsw.edu.au   www.clic.det.nsw.edu.au

http://www.spotlessinteractive.com/articles/accessibility/accessibility-for-project-managers.php  from a UK group, Spotless Interactive.

This is a major issue for developers of learning resources, and this summary provides many good points about planning for accessibility in projects. A subsequent article promises to look at the role of Information Architect in producing accessible websites.

Similar points about project management are made in the OptionKeys accessibility website at: http://www.cli.nsw.edu.au/optionkeys/ , especially under “Guidelines: Plan for accessibility” :

http://www.cli.nsw.edu.au/optionkeys/guidelines/plan.htm  .

Other accessibility information and reviews are also available at Andrew Downie’s Accessibility Blog: http://accessiblecli.wordpress.com/ .

This W3C site :  http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/REC-mwabp-20101214/  about mobile best practices assumes that  devices will have support for standard XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS capability. Specifically it focuses “on making use of advanced device capabilities to deliver the best possible experience on those devices that can support it” — as long as this still involves standards then it should be a valuable resource.

The supporting documents (W3C Notes) are very useful and practical documents which are updated periodically to reflect current practices and technologies. These draft updates include addition of techniques to help make PDFs more accessible.

The draft updates are available for review as Editors’ Drafts, and the changes are highlighted in tracked-changed versions at:

• Techniques for WCAG 2.0 Editors’ Draft : http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2011/WD-WCAG20-TECHS-20110621/complete-diff.html

• Understanding WCAG 2.0 Editors’ Draft : http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2011/WD-UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20-20110621/complete-diff.html

If you are interested in this topic see also an item about PDFs  on the Accessibility blog by Andrew Downie at: http://accessiblecli.wordpress.com/latest-news-2/#pdftechniques

It is aimed at Vocational Education trainers, but also has generic standards information. It includes best practice recommendations and technical considerations. Useful standards information includes HTML5, and its improved mobile video format (p16). Issues discussed include screen size for mobiles; various mobile browsers and operating systems.

The report appears to have been completed in late 2010, but content and links are still relevant.

This presentation covers the National Digital Learning Resources Network, ACARA, Australian Curriculum Connect, and the ACC pilot.

On a similar topic Irvin Flack and Evan Bailey presented at ALIA Information Online 2011 Conference in Sydney on February 1  on ‘Metadata for the uninterested’. PowerPoint available  [5.7MB] on ALIA website.

URL = http://www.linkaffiliates.net.au/Activities/FGOutputs/Impact_of_Standards_Work_on_Australian_education.pdf

However, the momentum has been steadily building in library-land, and we may, as Diane Hillmann posts, be witnessing a tectonic shift in bibliographic metadata. A very interesting development is the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, which aims “to help increase global interoperability of library data on the Web.” From the home page:

“The group will explore how existing building blocks of librarianship, such as metadata models, metadata schemas, standards and protocols for building interoperability and library systems and networked environments, encourage libraries to bring their content, and generally re-orient their approaches to data interoperability towards the Web, also reaching to other communities. It will also envision these communities as a potential major provider of authoritative datasets (persons, topics…) for the Linked Data Web.”

If the library linked data efforts do take off, the education community could well be one of these communities that could contribute authoritative datasets for the Linked Data Web, and this could encourage educational organisations to expose their metadata in linked data formats.

The universe consists of objects having various qualities and standing in various relations.
-Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (1911-13).

The world is everything that is the case.
What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
The thought is the significant proposition.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

Derek Zoolander: Why do you hate models, Matilda?
Matilda Jeffries: Honestly?
Hansel: Yes.
Matilda: I think they’re vain, stupid, and incredibly self-centered.
Hansel: I totally agree with you. But how do you feel about male models?
-Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Owen Wilson, Zoolander (2001)

Models are hot right now in metadata circles.

Not the Miranda Kerr, Derek Zoolander, $10K-to-get-out-of-bed model, I mean the (much more exciting) conceptual, data-structuring type. Why? Here are two reasons:

1) Machine-readability

To create a linked web of data we need unambiguous metadata. We have to be clear about the things we’re describing and what we’re saying about them. Because metadata must now, above all, be machine-readable, and computers don’t handle ambiguity as well as we do. They don’t have our ability to make best guesses based on context and past experience. As I read recently in a Boston Globe article, a four-year old child can quickly fill in the blank in the sentence “The giraffe had a very long __” but a computer will struggle. Models help us put things in terms even a computer can understand.

2) Interoperability

Mikael Nilsson and his colleagues point out in their paper, Towards an interoperability framework for metadata standards, that unless the models of two metadata formats are compatible, it’s not possible to re-use components from one in the other. So to achieve interoperability between Dublin Core metadata and LOM, the DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce decided that LOM instances would have to be expressed in terms of the DC Abstract Model (DCAM). (Incidentally, today Tom Baker has published an interesting paper about a potential review of DCAM:  DCAM: past, present, future.)

Metadata modelling is not new. Aristotle presented not one but two models of the world in his Categories. Unfortunately, as often with Aristotle, it’s not easy to work out exactly what he is saying, but his categories of ‘things that are said’ are: (1) substance; (2) quantity; (3) quality; (4) relatives; (5) somewhere; (6) sometime; (7) being in a position; (8) having; (9) acting; and (10) being acted upon.

Take the first category (substance) as equivalent to ‘resource’ or ‘entity’ and the others as attributes of a resource and you can reduce Aristotle’s model to the familiar entity-attribute-value (or in RDF terminology, subject-predicate-object) triple that is the core of today’s metadata models, eg:

• Australia (subject) has-capital (predicate) Canberra (object)
• The novel Moby Dick (subject) has-author (predicate) Hermann Melville (object)

These modern models are much like the logical atomism of early 20th century philosophers, Russell, Whitehead and Wittgenstein.

Once the foundation model is established, we can build domain models on top to model particular parts of the universe, eg educational resources in the case of DC-Education, bibliographic resources in the case of FRBR. The Dublin Core Singapore Framework describes how this all works.

So not all models are vain, stupid and self-centred. And there is a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good-looking.