Towards a Role-Based Metadata Scheme for

Educational Digital Libraries : A Case Study in Singapore

+Dian Melati &

*Ming Yin

++Yin-Leng Theng, Dion Goh & **Ee-Peng Lim

+Temasek Polytechnic*Centre for Advanced Info Systems

++School of Communication & Info**School of Computer Engineering

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Outline of Presentation

1. Describe the development of an appropriate metadata scheme for GeogDL, a Web-based DL application containing past year exam resources for students taking a Singapore national exam in Geography.

2. Report initial evaluation of this role-based metadata scheme.

3. Discuss concrete implementation of this metadata scheme in GeogDL.

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Background on GeogDL

- GeogDL Built to assist secondary school students (for 15 – 16 years old) to revise for the GCE ‘O’ level exams.

- Past-year exam questions (with their solutions) are created as separate G-Portal projects.

- Each project consists of Web resources, at least one of which contains the solution to the question.

- Resources may be organised into layers.- Two points of access via: (1) classification interface (2) map-based interface

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classification interface

map-based interface

overall view

links to other related topicsECDL2003

Step 3View Question

Step 2Select URL on question metadata

Step 1Select question onclassification interface

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1. Development of an appropriate metadata for GeogDL

A. Examined well-known metadata schemes for educational resources : (i) GEM; (ii) IMS; and (iii) SCORM

B. Studied SingCore, a Singapore-defined standard, which is part of the Singapore e-Learning Framework (SeLF).

C. Incorporated Ellington et. Al (1995)’s work on Successful Learning Experiences and Carroll’s Scenario-Based Design (2000) to draw up typical scenarios of use for GeogDL

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A. Well-known Metadata Schemes

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1. Development of metadata for GeogDL

- Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM)- Instructional Management System (IMS)- Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)

Commonly known standard for Internet

For educational resources

- Dublin Core (DC)

B. SingCORE

- For GeogDL to be used by schools in Singapore, its metadata scheme needs to subscribe not only to international standards but also to SingCORE, a Singapore-defined standard for metadata developed as part of the Singapore e-Learning Framework (SeLF).

- SingCORE : “Sing” for Singapore” and “CORE” to denote important parts.

- SingCORE has 8 categories proposed in the IMS Learning Resource Metadata Specifications Version 1.2.2, adopting the IEE Learning Object MetaData’s conceptual model.

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1. Development of metadata for GeogDL

C. Scenarios of use

- Goal #1 : Practice/revision

- Goal #2 : Trends Analysis

- Goal #3 : Mock Exam

- Goal #4 : Related links

We applied Ellington et. Al (1995)’s work on Successful Learning Experiences and Carroll’s Scenario-Based Design to draw up 4 scenarios of use for GeogDL. Confirmed with student design partners :

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1. Development of metadata for GeogDL

2. Initial Evaluation

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1. The design team interrogated the SingCORE metadata set using the above 4 goals.

2. Conducted an initial evaluation with students and lecturers from the Information Studies Programme at Temasek Polytechnic (Singapore)

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- The design team interrogated the SingCORE metadata set using the above 4 goals.

- We found SingCORE to be comprehensive but not adequate enough to support the types of resources for the 4 scenarios of use.

Goals #1 & 2 : Need metadata elements to describe the type of exam questions.

Recommendation : Pointer to an external metadata schema for exam

resources under “Learning Resource Type” in the “Educational” Category. See Figure 1 [Click].

1. With Design Team

2. Initial Evaluation

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2. Initial Evaluation

Goals #1 & 2 : To support feedback and comments from users, there is a need to capture these.

Recommendations :

1. Create an additional 9th category named “Annotation”. Annotations to take the form of free-text contribution as in forums/chats or feedback in Likert-scale ratings. See [click].

2. To address multiple versions, versioning history of an annotation is kept.

Create a “Version History Location” pointer to 2 or more elements “Version ID” and “Parent ID” under the Life cycle” category. See [click].

1. With Design Team

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2. Initial Evaluation

Goal #4 : Need to describe the relationships between elements. This is addressed in SingCORE under the “Relation” category.

Goal #3 : Need to capture students’ performance. But should not be captured in the metadata schema, so we would not be addressing it in this paper.

1. With Design Team

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2. Initial Evaluation

2. With Users

- Conducted an initial evaluation with students and lecturers from the Information Studies Programme at Temasek Polytechnic (Singapore)

- Two 3rd-year students and three lecturers took part.

- They were familiar with general metadata standards, however, they were new with the SingCORE metadata set.

- Subjects were shown the proposed interface to the revised SingCORE metadata system to capture inputs.

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2. Initial Evaluation

2. With Users

- Conducted an initial evaluation with students and lecturers from the Information Studies Programme at Temasek Polytechnic (Singapore)

- Two 3rd-year students and three lecturers took part.

- They were familiar with general metadata standards, however, they were new with the SingCORE metadata set.

- Subjects were shown the proposed interface to the revised SingCORE metadata system to capture inputs.

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2. Initial Evaluation

1. With Users

- Given a sample geography exam question, they were asked to describe the metadata using the revised SingCORE standard.

- For each element in the metadata scheme, the subjects were asked to comment on the comprehensiveness and usefulness using a 5-point Likert-type scale.

- An evaluator was around to give additional help in coding the particular exam question using the metadata scheme.

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2. Initial Evaluation

2. With Users

- Problem #1.Some of the terms used to describe the element were too difficult to understand, even to the subjects who were library-science-trained.

- Problem #2. They were familiar with DC and MARC schemes, they would prefer cataloguing according to material types instead of the step-by-step entry based on the eight categories, as proposed by SingCORE.

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2. Initial Evaluation

2. With Users

- Problem #3.They were too many elements in the schema to be completed.

- Recommendations.

1. Speak the users’ language.2. Revised metadata to adapt to the different roles of teachers/educators

and librarians contributing geography resources to GeogDL, allowing them to see only those elements relevant to them.

3. See revised role-based GeogDL metadata set [click].

3. Concrete Proposal & Implementation

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- The role-based schema of GeogDL allows contributors such as teachers/educators, librarians and students to contribute to different categories and elements of the metadata.

- To implement the role-based schema, an XML role file is designed to contain all the roles-related information such as :

types of users; associated tasks performed; and aspects of metadata that require their inputs.

- Architecture of a role-based metadata tool in GeogDL [click].

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3. Concrete Proposal & Implementation

- For the purpose of this presentation, we discuss only the components relevant to metadata creation and maintenance : (i) resource input

(ii) resource import (iii) resource export

- Role-based metadata tool in relation to the entire GeogDL architecture [click].

- GeogDL also supports import of other metadata formats and convert to GeogDL-compliant metadata format.

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3. Concrete Proposal & Implementation

- The tool also allows for conversion and export of GeogDL metadata to other established metadata formats.

- Currently, working on IMS- and SingCORE-compliant metadata to/from GeogDL-compliant metadata.

- Please come to demo in the evening.

Related Work ??

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Differences

- GeogDL captures details on exam questions, sources and related sources, contributed by teachers/educators for students.

- DLESE (Digital Library for Earth System Education) contains elements through sharing of geography resources for various educational levels in earth system science education, contributed by users. Standards used : DC and IMS.

Related Work ??

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Differences

- Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) standard is a complex standard with 119 compound elements or groups of elements hierarchically arranged to describe relationships among other elements.

- GeogDL metadata scheme has a slightly shorter 51 elements.

Conclusions and On-Going Work

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- Designing any system faces tradeoffs. One could go for simple design but not comprehensive enough to meet all requirements. In contrast, one could go for detailed and exhaustive design, but may lack practical usage.

- GeogDL aims to address these 2 areas by providing a role-based metadata schema to deal with the extensive set of elements by assigning different people to contribute to only certain elements, thus reducing the entry set of elements for each user.

Conclusions and On-Going Work

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- More work needs to be done to further refine, test and use the metadata scheme involving different groups of authors, teachers/educators and librarians.

- On-going work involves evaluating the new interface components in GeogDL to support multi-role inputs of the metadata of geography resources, as well as import/export of metadata from/to established formats to allow for wider use of resources.

Acknowledgements

- SingAREN (Singapore) for funding the G-Portal and GeogDL projects. Research grant M48020004

- Teachers and students at Temasek Polytechnic (Singapore)

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Dublin Core (DC)

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Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM)

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Instructional Management System (IMS)

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Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)

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