Linking research & learning technologies through standards

The ISO 2146 standard defines a conceptual framework for registry services. It lays out a model of parties, collections, services, and activities, and how they all relate to each other, to capture the process of a library or repository going about its business of collecting content, and making content available. The standard originated in the library sphere, but is being written in a generic enough fashion to apply across a broad range of registries, both physical and digital, and across a range of disciplines. At the same time, it is intelligently specific in the attributes and relations it defines, so it allows reasonably detailed descriptions of what is going on in a registry. These descriptions can be the basis for cogent and useable metadata on collections in general, and on how they are presented to the world.

The new draft of ISO 2146 is still in progress (with the core participation of Link Affiliate Judith Pearce). But because of its advantages, it has already seen use in several domains. The Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA), under the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Reposiories (APSR), has used ISO 2146 as the basis for its descriptions of research collections in Australia, to be used for better discovery of both collections and services. ORCA, in turn, will form a major part of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS)’ Data Commons, a space where researchers nationally can share, discover, and build on the available collections of each others’ work.

In the e-learning space, the IMS Learning Object Discovery and Exchange project group has been set up to create consistent descriptions of registries of learning content, and services to discover and access such content. The collection descriptions that will be accessed through LODE all involve learning objects, but these can be of very different sorts, and with very heterogeneous content; IMS LODE is looking to be applied in contexts like the ASPECT project, or the Globe alliance, coordinating registries of learning content at various levels of schooling, from many countries.

Link Affiliates participates in IMS LODE. As the conceptual model for LODE description of registries was being drawn up, we believed that a profile of ISO 2146, customised to the particular requirements of e-learning registries, would be a suitable basis for it. Customising the ISO 2146 is consistent with how the scheme is meant to be used: it is a framework for making sense of the registry world, rather than a uniform schema—which is why it does not define an XML serialisation. That said, IMS LODE ISO 2146 is a rather elaborate model: it defines well over forty entities to describe the many ways in which registry entities can relate to each other, with complex relations between them. Cutting them down to a profile applicable to our context needed us to get a quick overview of what the model was expressing, and what the consequences were of eliminating or adding entities.

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In 2008, the Link Affiliates team carried out a project for DEEWR, the Department of Education Employment and Work Place Relations, to investigate the use of learner identities especially in the school sector. All states and territories, were consulted at the school level including government and non government school jurisdictions, as well as vocational education and higher education representatives.
The report from this work can be found at the Australian Information and Communications Technology in Education Committee, AICTEC website at http://www.aictec.edu.au/aictec/go/home/about/pid/289     It is a hefty report and not one for the faint hearted. It uses an e- framework http://www.e-framework.org/ approach to analyse the possibilities for using a learner identity management framework, LIMF for assisting in the smooth transition of students between jurisdictions and systems. More than 180,000 students transfer between systems/jurisdictions each year and the current manual system of transferring information to assist in a smooth learning transition is not well utlised. 

The report made a number of recommendations on how to progress the use of learner identities in Australia especialy with regard to student transfer. These recommendations are now under consideration by a sub committee of AICTEC.
At the same time the vocational education sector is revisting the report to assist in the establishment of e-portfolio approaches.

This was a tight contained project carried out within a short time frame. While it was concerned to report on the specific issue of school student transfer, it is suggested that it is a useful document for consideration of learner identity issues in general. Other perspectives would be most welcome.

Hyperlinks break, and there has long been a realisation that there is information online whose hyperlinks should not break. Repositories have been set up to ensure the ongoing availability of online information; but like any online data source, repositories too change servers and structures and platforms, and their hyperlinks too break. This is a problem that affects e-research as much as it does e-libraries and e-learning. With the increasing move to publish and cite research data online, the issue is becoming even more keenly felt.

The repository community has come to accept that persistent identifiers help deal with this issue; they do this through some mechanism of redirection to the current network location of a resource. In itself, this does not solve the issue: it’s no good having a persistent identifier redirect to the current network location, if the redirection is not updated, or the identifier server is down, or the data is tampered with. But removing the dependency on current location does at least allow procedures to be put in place, which can prevent foreseeable disruptions to the persistent access to a resource.

The PILIN project was tasked with exploring the policy and technological issues behind persisting identifiers; as a result, it produced quite a bit of text, and some code. Institutions that already host persistent identifiers can use these outputs to firm up their infrastructure. But PILIN was not an operational project, and it could not build a sustainable, backbone identifier infrastructure. That is the job for a national service supporting access to data: individuals and institutions should be able to rely on such a service to keep their identifiers around in the long run, even if they cannot host the identifiers themselves.

The Australian National Data Service fits that description, and has acknowledged from the beginning that providing persistent identifiers are a core part of its business. It has already piloted a persistent identifier service based on the Handle System, and is going live with it. The service is intended for B2B use through XML over HTTP, rather than manually administering each identifier: this encourages users to automate solutions to maintaining identifiers, which is sounder practice for ensuring that identifiers really are kept up to date.

The Link Affiliates team has also been writing training materials on persistent identifiers, building on the PILIN project work, and concentrating in particular on the range of policies needed to ensure persistence. Although ANDS is providing the infrastructure for hosting the identifiers, much of the policy implementation still has to happen on the side of the researchers and data managers, who have requested the identifiers and are responsible for keeping them up to date.

A brief note, by the by, that I have posted elsewhere on the UKOLN International Repository Workshop, and its work on persistent identifiers. The workshop came up with a model for identifier interoperability, as discoverable assertions of equivalence or difference of different identifier names. This is humble and unexciting enough to be feasible (particularly for author identity, a fraught issue which has already engaged much discussion).

Hi, and welcome to the Link Affiliates Blog.  A place were you’ll be hearing about our team’s thoughts on international e-learning and e-research interoperability and standards activities.

But, before we go there, I thought I’d tackle the really big question of …

Why a Link Affiliates blog?

Link Affiliates team members have been providing interoperability and technical advice to the Australian education community since the mid 1990′s. Traditionally, we have provided this advice directly to projects and consultative groups like LORN, The Le@rning Federation, the e-Framework …

We’ve always known that the conversations and experiences we share with these projects deserved to be shared more broadly through a forum like a blog, but have never done anything about it, until now …

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