education.au

Metadata and the Carrick Exchange

In creating the RIN demonstrator in 2006, some infrastructure issues in the higher education sector were identified as needing attention. These included metadata, digital rights management, and authentication for the whole of the higher education sector..

education.au has considerable expertise in metadata profile development and management through the edna metadata profile, the development of the Learning Federation Metadata Application Profile through the joint venture TLF, and the Vetadata profile for use in the Australian vocational education and training sector.

Metadata is just data about data - it's the way we describe a piece of information/content - this may be a resource, a photo, a person, an event, a blog, a poll, a news item a database etc. If we are able to describe different pieces of information in a consistently structured way, then technology enables us to do things with that data and provide better, more dynamic and relevant information services.

There's nothing particularly hard about metadata - when you get down to it a metadata record usually includes a title/name, a description and an identifier such as a URL or an ISBN number. More extensive metadata may also be available depending on the kind of thing the metadata is describing.

You can find out more about metadata and metadata application profiles at the Technical Standards website. Two of the best known international standards used in the education sector on which many others are based are Dublin Core, and Learning Object Metadata (LOM).

Some Web 2.0 technology services are built around metadata - some of this is structured metadata. Some of it is unstructured metadata - like community contributed 'tags' to describe resources. These terms become tag clouds and an thus alternative method for browsing through and discovering content.

Day-to-day use and application of metadata

Day-to-day application and use of metadata is a component of the work of education.au's information officers. This experience provides the agency with a wealth of knowledge about what works and does not work in metadata, and what's a pragmatic approach that deals with the tension between the time (and cost) associated with creating a quality metadata record and the services that can be delivered as a result.

Benefits of using structured metadata

Benefits of using structured metadata based on international standards include:

• interoperability with other projects, information services and data sets which means content can be exchanged, imported and exported using international standards such as OAI
• the capacity to provide services that are not tied directly to a specific web service but can be integrated into other services
• the capacity to deliver services to portable devices such as mobile phones and PDAs
• the ability to munge and mashup data to provide new combinations of services

Addressing the issue of Metadata and the Carrick Exchange

To address the needs of the Carrick Exchange for metadata, education.au has undertaken an 'investigation' process. This investigation is made up of three parts.

• A project design
• An environmental scan
• Consultation with the higher education sector

Project design

The project design outlines the issues to be addressed by the consultation process. Find this document at the bottom of this page.

Envrionmental scan

The environmental scan document reviews the main application profiles and vocabularies used in the higher education sector - particularly in national higher education projects. It also reviews international standards and projects relevant to the Carrick Exchange and focuses on the content types identified for the Carrick Exchange. The research work for the environmental scan was undertaken by one of education.au's metadata specialists, Helen Galatis. Find the environmental scan document at the bottom of this page.

Consultation with the higher education sector

education.au established the Carrick Exchange Metadatata Investigation Reference Group and its Terms of Reference. The members of the Reference Group are drawn from Australian projects with national coverage - most of which have a higher education focus, or are from higher education institutions.

The consultation process involved a face-to-face meeting in Sydney in June 2007 facilitated by Professor Rod McDonald, and subsequent teleconferences.

The Reference Group included:

• Anne Loria, Digital Respositories Team, Griffith University
• Basil Dewhurst, People Australia project (NLA)
• Chris Blackall - Australian Sustainable Repositories Project
• Di Newton, Carrick Institute
• Derek Whitehead, Swinburne University
• Ebe Kartus, RMIT
• Eve Young, University of Melbourne
• Joan Gray, ARROW project
• Neil Godfrey, RUBRIC project
• Nigel Ward, ADL

Outcome

The outcome of the consultation is a metadata proposal for the Carrick Exchange provided to the Carrick Institute.