Ariadne Article – 'What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the LOM Standard?'

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue41/godby/

Score one for the librarians!

This article by Carol Jean Godby of the OCLC is an absolute bombshell and a must-read for folks working with learning object metadata standards. She follows up on works by Norm Friesen and Lorna Campbell that survey existing application profiles of the IEEE LOM with a view to answering three main questions:

1. Which elements are most widely adopted?
2. What are the prospects for interoperability given these profiles and the entirely optional nature of any of the elements
3. What can be learnt about the motivation for developing an application profile (a.k.a. why can’t us educational technologist just submit to one standard way of describing things or let the librarians do it)

Somewhat unsurprisingly, like Friesen and Campbell before her, she reports that the most used fields from the LOM can be easily mapped to the existing Dublin Core fields, and that we’re pretty much all over the map when it comes to all of the special ‘pedagogical’ type fields that were supposedly the motivation for this whole exercise in the first place. (more…)

When it comes to the potential for interoperability delivered by these various application profiles, Godby’s analysis seems to say it’s murky at best. At one point, she sums up “the best prospects for interoperability are local, and they degrade as institutional, linguistic, and cultural boundaries are crossed.” Additionally alarming (though painfully accurate) is her statement that

“since subject data is sparsely represented, and subject classification schemes for learning objects are still under active development, discovery strategies for LOM records will probably be restricted to known-item searching.”

Finally, she lands a real body blow with a seemingly offhand comment:

“Nevertheless, this evidence constitutes only a precondition for interoperability. A study of application profiles must make the simplifying assumption that profiles are interoperable if they recommend the same elements. But … two application profiles might use LOM.Classification.Purpose and still fail to interoperate because this element could be used to annotate different facets of the resource, such as pedagogical intent and position within a knowledge hierarchy.”

Godby’s not out for blood, though, and makes some very reasonable recommendations at the end of the paper, acknowledging that the problem area these standards are supposed to address is itself still very much in flux. The notion of two layers of metadata, one core to maximize interoperability and harvesting, the other with more local data, seems on the surface worthy of further discussion. In any case, this paper and its findings deserve a lengthy response from many in the elearning standards field who have promoted the LOM (and its application profiles) as the way forward for discovering reusable learning content. – SWL