relevance of SCHEME in metadata for education in Australia

EdNA (Education Network Australia - http://www.edna.edu.au) is a
collaborative effort of all sectors of education in Australia (schools,
universities, vocational education and training and adult and community
education). We have developed a metadata standard based on Dublin Core to
facilitate the decentralised cataloguing of web pages by the hundreds of
education web sites in Australia.  A draft is available at:
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/owa/info.getpage?sp=&pagecode=5210

The use of the 'scheme' qualifier is an important part of our ability to
cater to the diverse cataloguing systems in use in education. For details
see the schemes page at:
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/owa/info.getpage?sp=&pagecode=5212
and the discussion of the DC.SUBJECT field in
http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/owa/info.getpage?sp=&pagecode=5211#SUBJECT

The use of schemes gives us the ability to create metadata records which
have precise meanings in EdNA but also provide useful cataloguing
information for more general harvesting of metadata based on Dublin Core.

The DC4 Workshop in Canberra canvassed problems with all the existing ways
of coding scheme information in HTML and recommended two interim formats.
EdNA will be using the format:
<META NAME="DC.subject" CONTENT="(scheme=APSDEP)Apprenticeship, Block
Release">

Inclusion of the Scheme (and Language) qualifiers in the next version of
HTML would give a far more satisfactory format for storage of metadata in
HTML. Support from W3C for the implementation of the recommendations of the
DC4 Workshop will be important in encouraging the development of tools
which will allow  users to enter metadata in a way which is both convenient
for them and conforms to the semantics developed by the Dublin Core community.

Thanks for your consideration.

(NB: I am not a member of the www-html@w3.org list, so please address any
comments in reply to me direct or via the meta2 list - meta2@mrrl.lut.ac.uk )

Jack Gilding


end =============================================================
Jack Gilding                         ph:  (03)9628-4652
Project Manager, VET EdNA Project    fax: (03)9628-2472
Communications & Multimedia Unit     j.gilding@c031.aone.net.au
OTFE, PO Box 266D Melbourne VIC 3001 http://www.edna.edu.au/vetwp/ 

(level 4 Rialto Sth Tower 525 Collins Street Melbourne Australia)

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 1997 21:49:41 UTC