Conceptual design and deployment of a metadata framework for educational resources on the internet

✍ Scribed by Sutton, Stuart A.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 194 KB
• Volume: 50
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(1999)50:13<1182::aid-asi4>3.0.co;2-j

✦ Synopsis

The metadata framework described in this article stems from a growing concern of the U.S. Department of Education and its National Library of Education that teachers, students, and parents are encountering increasing difficulty in accessing educational resources on the Internet even as those resources are becoming more abundant. This concern is joined by the realization that as the Internet matures as a publishing environment, the successful management of resource repositories will hinge to a great extent on the intelligent use of metadata. We first explicate the conceptual foundations for the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) framework including the adoption of the Dublin Core Element Set as its base referent, and the extension of that set to meet the needs of the domain. We then discuss the complex of decisions that must be made regarding selection of the units of description and the structuring of an information space. The article concludes with a discussion of metadata generation, the association of metadata to the objects described, and a general description of the GEM system architecture.