More on IMS

Hello Team,

Hope you got the chance to check out some of the references I sent
previously. 

The Microsoft eLearn toolkit (called LRN) is particularly useful for
learning more about IMS, see the download page
http://www.microsoft.com/elearn/support.asp
for details of how to download various eLearn tools and IMS samples.

These tools all use the XML version of IMS, but it is apparent that

- LRN is mainly using IMS for structural metadata, i.e. aggregating pages of
HTML into content objects, rather than descriptive metadata. There is very
little descriptive metadata in the sample IMS XML files beyond object title
and creator. 

- One notable expections is
spec samples\ims content\full_metadata\imsmanifest.xml
This is split into general, lifecycle, metametadata, technical, educational
and rights sections. The LRN editor tool that comes with the download makes
it easy to investigate the manifest. 

- In the example IMS, files are split into three sections
  o metadata
  o organization
  o resources
the organization describes how the resources are organized e.g. a toc so
this references the resources. 

- IMS seems to be trying to solve a problem which in my view is considerably
more generic than "learning objects" e.g. aggregating content (html pages,
.gifs, .jpgs etc) into objects for example
 o manuals
 o ebooks (the ebook community already has a similar standard)
 o photograph albums etc

There is a tool in LRN that converts Microsoft Powerpoint files to IMS
format. However in practice I couldn't get it to work, a shame as that would
be one way of creating an IMS corpus but I suspect we would still need to
add descriptive metadata by hand.

best regards,

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2003 10:48:36 UTC