Thoughts after Call_02

Dear All,

Thanks for coming to Call_02. We will have no call next week (Good Friday) but will pick things up again after Easter on 10 April.

My takeaways from the call are:

1. Ultimately, the development of a tool is required. But before then, we need to make sure we are targeting the right tool.

2. We need a "prospectus" that explains the idea and the potential of XDMDL in a way that people can understand, without having the benefit of yet being able to offer working demonstrations. I feel that I am perhaps too deeply into my own strawman to be able to articulate that high level prospectus well - so will appreciate any help that other members of the group can give in focusing on the key messages.

3. We need to compare the sort of functionality that I have been envisaging (whether it is expressed as XML or something else) against other approaches to the same (or perhaps similar) problems. Jason demonstrated his work on Wordnet for disambiguating the meaning of verbs which might be used with xAPI. My hunch is that this is a related but slightly lower-level problem to the one that I am trying to solve with XDMDL - the structuring of data models. But we need to understand the relationship between the two technologies and the problems they are trying to solve.

I wonder if we could focus on the particular problem of creating controlled vocabularies for the xAPI verb and what it actually means to create verbs which are used consistently by focusing on a use case.

Possible activities for next call in two weeks (I am told that "fortnight" is quaintly Olde English)

1. If people can read through the two sections of my paper, available on the wiki in the Drafting section, you might have some feedback on the details. But otherwise, for the time being at least, I think I have taken up enough time on calls for my strawman proposal and suggest we should move on to some combination of the following.

2. Some thoughts on the prospectus - maybe starting with the ecosystem and working out from there. I think that Pierre is interested to pick up on any work which focuses on a broader scope, addressing this wider vision of what the digital ecosystem for education might look like and how XDMDL or something similar might contribute to it.

3. Jason may like to take one call to give us a presentation in greater depth on what he has been doing with web ontologies.

4. Maybe on the back of that, we could focus on a use case for the use of different verbs with xAPI - and look to define the problems and see what sort of contribution can be made by the web ontology and by an XDMDL schema approach.

5. I can work up a use-case, as proposed by Frank, for the return of competency information in an xAPI result record - that may then provide an opportunity to revisit the strawman in a few calls time.
Any thoughts on how we should structure the next few calls, do shout. Particularly if you would like to lead a call.

Best wishes,
Crispin

PS. I have posted this email to the wiki as a comment, along with a copy of my slides to http://wiki.saltis.org/display/XDMDL/Call-02