Comments on Shigeo's paper

Educational Metadata for Intangible Attributes of Archival Items

See esp LRMI at https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/lrmi/1.1

See Shigeo’s paper … https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353661818_Metadata_model_for_organizing_digital_archives_of_tangible_and_intangible_cultural_heritage_and_linking_cultural_heritage_information_in_digital_space

First thing is how useful this model is – thank you!

Now, the next paras directly from the paper show how relevant the paper is to the Telematics project. The word ‘educational’ has replaced the word ‘cultural’.

Background. There are many digital archives in educational domains, but there is no well-established metadata model which covers both tangible and intangible educational heritage. Neither is there a well-established metadata model applicable to building digital archives by aggregating existing educational heritage information [EHI].

Objectives. The objective of this study is to develop a metadata model for digital archives of diverse educational resources and dispersed communities, where metadata aggregation from different sources is required. This paper presents a model called Educational Heritage in Digital Environment (EHDE) for organizing various digital EHI organized as a digital archive.

Methods. The EHDE model is created as a generalized metadata model. It clearly distinguishes an intangible educational heritage entity and its instantiation to model digital archives for intangible educational heritage like those for tangible educational heritage. The EHDE model is defined using the One-to-One Principle of metadata, and is used to clearly identify the relationships between metadata and the entities described by the metadata. Finally, this paper shows the application of the EHDE with use cases of cultural heritage objects.

Results. EHDE enables the organization of digital educational heritage information related to tangible and intangible educational heritage. It identifies the physical and digital information environment of educational heritage, and further supports the modeling of digital archives built by aggregating educational heritage information on the Web.

Contributions. This novel approach will benefit memory institutions which have insufficient resources to create digital resources such as those in South and Southeast Asia. Also, intangible educational heritage organization through instantiation is a useful approach.

I am not sure that there is a model for the metadata for education but Chris has pointed to taxonomies of learning that some explored in the past. Bloom’s, for example, was pre-computers and we are trying to capture learning with computers, ie from whthe 1980’s, let’s say, and to use our schema on the Sunrise collection but have it so that other ways of teaching/learning can also be described with it.

Shigeo, I have said to Chris that I think we want to distinguish perhaps 5 attributes of learning used by educationalists and including ‘Sunrise style’ and have about 5 values for each attribute – something like that. The resources we have will sometimes be physical (tangible) but at least will also all have digital versions. A typical one is, as I said in the use case, a photo of three children with one of them rasiing her hand obviously sorting out right from left. The ‘glue’ from the image is ‘body syntonicity’ and we have lots of other photos etc showing a similar thing in a different way.So, as I see it, the item is the photo, the ‘curated digital instance’ and the collection will demonstrate ‘body syntonicity’ as part of the heritage of ‘Sunrise style’. A more didactic educational setting would render images of kids in rows listening to a teacher – let’s say, and so again the curated digital instance would be the child listening in the photo and the heritage might be ‘didactic teaching’.

Clearly a motivation for your work, Shigeo, is enabling all the collections to be brought together – I think my motivation is to show that although a child using a computer looks like a child using a computer, what is happening is often very different and we need a way to distinguish these differences.

(Metadata aggregation etc are never discussed by Liddy because that has to be where the magic happens, she trusts but does not know about it!)

OK, I get the bit about 1-1 and the perspectives changing what is recorded in metadata and am comfortable with app profiles, of course. I need to think about ‘facets’. The problems associated with ‘dirty metadata’ (avoidance of 1-1 rule) are not a problem for us. And BTW, instead of Dublin Core metadata, I would be making ISO/IEC MLR metadata …(We have a paper in the DCMI Conf in November.) I don’t think we need to worry about the curation etc sections of the paper.

So now for the metadata schema!