Linking research & learning technologies through standards

Last month, ISO released the long-awaited third edition of the ISO 2146 standard for Registry services for libraries and related organisations. ISO 2146 is a standard of great interest to repository communities, and we have already posted on it at some length, including its use as a basis for the Australian National Data Service’s RIF-CS schema, and the IMS LODE registry model. (The latter post includes a UML diagram of the ISO 2146 classes as of its 2008 draft.) Because of this interest, it is worth describing the standard further.
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Link Affiliates will be participating in the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit, to be held in Washington DC on April 13-14 2010:

There have been numerous learning content registry and repository projects. This summit aims to bring together participants to determine “where are we” and “what’s next” for learning content registries and repositories, dealing with business, policy and technical issues. The summit is targeted to those who develop, deploy or use registries and repositories to manage and deliver learning content along with users who develop and publish learning content or want to find it.

Rather than just submitting a position paper to the summit, we thought we would share our thoughts here on some of the trends we see happening in repositories and repository federation: the Googlification of repositories, open interfaces, repository mandate and user needs, and registry-of-registry approaches to repository federation.

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We have already presented the People Australia and the Register My Data initiatives, and their different approaches to encoding information about parties and their identity. We elsewhere walk through a comparison of their schemata, which consists of a walkthrough the schemata, and a discussion of points of disparity. We first compare People Australia with ISO 2146 proper, before comparing ISO 2146 with RIF-CS.

Our comparison is motivated by the fact that ANDS will be using People Australia as a primary resource for researcher identity. The comparison is specific to the process of importing People Australia metadata into the format required for Register My Data.
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We have seen in a previous post that different representations of identity are possible, because there are different business motivations for knowing a party’s identity. Depending on the use we put the identity to, different kinds of detail need to be gathered about a party.

There are two major initiatives for identifying parties being considered at the moment in Australian e-research. Register My Data aims to improve the discovery of research data through the Australian Research Data Commons, and People Australia aims to improve the discovery of resources by and about people and organisations generally. The initiatives do not address exactly the same business concerns, so the metadata they gather are different.
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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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