educause october 29, 2001 a gem of a resource: the gateway to educational materials copyright nancy...

EducauseOctober 29, 2001

A GEM of a Resource:The Gateway to Educational

MaterialsCopyright Nancy Virgil Morgan, 2001. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

Nancy Virgil MorganCoordinator

nmorgan@iis.syr.edu

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Sponsors

• U.S. Department of Education

• ERIC Clearinghouse onInformation & Technology

• Syracuse University School of Information Studies

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Outline

• About GEM

• Metadata

• The Gateway

• “Powered” by GEM

• Research

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Mission

Consortium effort to improve access to uncataloged collections of educational materials on non-profit, commercial and government Internet sites.

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About GEM

• 1996 Stakeholders Meeting– Education content providers, (government,

commercial, non-profit) professional education associations, teachers

– Dublin Core Metadata

• October 2001:– 420 GEM Consortium Members

– 23,000 records in The Gateway

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Metadata Defined

• Structured data about data

• Describes, manages, and organizes resources

• Aids in process of Network Resource Discovery and Retrieval

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GEM Metadata Defined

• Describes, manages, organizes education resources

• Extension of Dublin Core

• Provides on-target, efficient searching by grade, subject keyword

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Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

DCMI is an organization dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable more intelligent information discovery systems.

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Dublin Core Widely Implemented

60 projects listed:

http://www.dublincore.org/projects/

Education related projects from Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Germany, United States have adopted Dublin Core.

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ANSI Standard Z39.85-2001Dublin Core Metadata Elements

• Coverage • Creator• Date• Description• Format• Identifier• Language• Other

Contributor

• Publisher

• Relation

• Resource Type

• Rights

• Source

• Subject

• Title

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DC and GEM 2.0(draft)

• dc-ed.audience – dc-ed.mediator– dc-ed.level (Grade)– gemq.age– gemq.beneficiary

• gem.duration• gem.resources• gem.pedagogy• gem.competency (Standards)• gem.cataloging

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The Gatewayhttp://www.thegateway.org

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Resources

SeparateMetadata

EmbeddedMetadataGEMCat

catalog

Creating The Gateway GEM Tools:

Creating/Editing Metadata

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SeparateMetadata

EmbeddedMetadata

HARVEST

local harvest

web harvest

Index files

Files from DB driven collections

Full Site Index(The

Gateway)

Creating The Gateway GEM Tools:

Harvest Process

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Powered by GEM

• MCI WorldCom Foundation’s MarcoPolo

marcopolosearch.org

• NASA Space Science Education Resource Directory

teachspacescience.stsci.edu/

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Powered by GEM

• Federal Resources for Education Excellence

www.ed.gov

• CHIN Teachers’ Centre

www.virtualmuseum.ca

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Powered by GEM

NSF 00-44, National Science, Mathematics,

Engineering, and Technology Education

Digital Library (NSDL)

ED-01-R-0001, Regional Educational

Laboratories

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Powered by GEM

• Structured data means efficient, on target retrieval

• Fully conformant with Dublin Core – recognized, widely implemented standard

• User-based: asked teachers how they searched for lesson plans (1996)

• Open source, non-proprietary

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GEM Research

• Registry services

• GEMCat 4.0

• StandardConnections

• Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning

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Registries

• Manage local elements and qualifiers• Manage vocabularies and schemas• Incorporate into GEMCat – metadata

generation tool• Incorporate into The Gateway search

engine – tool for the end-user

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GEM Element Registry

• Extensible Open Rdf (EOR): Registry of GEM Elements and Element Qualifiers

– DCMI-based Registry of GEM schemas and Consortium member extensions to those schemas

– Open Source

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GEM Vocabulary Registry

• Registry of thesauri (mono- and multi-lingual) and other controlled vocabularies– Sapphire: Open source RDF-based

registry• Redhat Linux 7.1

• PostGreSQL

• Programming in Python

• 4Suite API

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GEM Vocabulary Registry

• NISO Z39.19 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Thesauri

• Demonstration Thesauri– ERIC Thesaurus– NASA Thesaurus– Australian Thesaurus of Educational

Descriptors

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Communication Protocols and Schemas

• Communication mechanisms for communicating between metadata tools and vocabulary registries– Metadata generation tools (e.g., GEMCat4.0)– Metadata search tools (e.g., GEM Gateway

software)• Mechanisms

– Protocols defining service interactions between metadata tools and registries

– Schemas defining data models used in communicating between metadata tools and registries

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GEMCat 4.0

• GEMCat: Metadata generation and editing tool• Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based• Open source

– Implemented in Java– Stanford API

• Network tool– Relies on registry communications:

• To be configured (available controlled vocabularies)

• To search and infuse terms from controlled vocabularies

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StandardConnections

• Mapping (correlating) educational resources to content standards

• StandardConnections– GEM research partnership

• Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL)

• Achieve– Compendix database of content standards—

cross-mapping local, state, national and international standards

• Protocols and schemas linking cataloging and search tools to the Compendix

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Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning

• GEM research partnership: Automatic extraction of GEM metadata from text-based educational objects

– NSF: National Science Digital Library

– Center for Natural Language Processing (Syracuse University)

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Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning

• StandardConnection (revisited)

– NSF Proposal: Automatic mapping of text-based resources to content standards using NLP

– Protocols and schemas (revisited) for tool-to-registry communications

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Conclusions

GEM Research helps GEM Users:

• Registries –a tool for catalogers (GEMCat) and educators (The Gateway).

• StandardConnection – help teachers find and retrieve resources correlated to content standards.

• Natural Language Processing & Machine Learning – ability to “scale-up” by automatic generation of metadata.

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More Information

• Email: geminfo@geminfo.org

• GEM Project: www.geminfo.org

• The Gateway: www.thegateway.org

• GEM Research Server: gemstar.ischool.washington.edu