Kattemingga Lodge Melbourne, Australia © 2000 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Jon Mason & Stuart Sutton, Co-Chairs Original Draft: 1 March 2000 All Rights Reserved

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Draft Recommendation for a “Standards” Category

It was unanimously agreed among members of the Working Group at the face-to-face meeting that the capacity to associate the educational resource being described with organizational, professional, province/state, national, and international content and process standards is an important function for networked information discovery and retrieval.

Two different implementations achieving the goal (at varying degrees) were identified and are set out below: (1) definition of a new education-specific Standard element, and (2) use of the DC.Relation element with a new element qualifier (e.g., &$147;ConformsTo” (or some other token capturing the notion)). Both implementations share the same justifications.

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Draft Recommendation #1 for a Standard Element
(Element & Element Qualifiers)

ELEMENT NAME	ELEMENT QUALIFIER NAME	VALUE QUALIFIER (CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES)	DEFINITION
STANDARD		The name given by its promulgating body to the standard being associated (e.g., the US’ “NCTM” (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics); the UK’s “NVQ” (National Vocational Qualification); and the Australian Qualifications Framework.	A reference to the education or training standard with which the resource is associated.
	IDENTIFIER		Where available, an identifier (or notation) that serves to uniquely identify the standard being associated.
	VERSION		Information identifying the version of the standard being referenced (e.g., a year of publication, a version number, etc.).

Draft Recommendation

ELEMENT:

• Name:  STANDARD
  
• Definition:  A reference to the education or training standard with which the resource is associated.
  
• Comment:  
  
  

ELEMENT QUALIFIER:

• Name:  IDENTIFIER
  
• Definition:  Where available, an identifier (or notation) that serves to uniquely identify the standard being associated.
  
• Comment:  With increasing frequency, content and process standards are uniquely identified by means of structured notation (e.g., in the manner or Dewey Decimal class numbers) that can support machine processing.
  
  

ELEMENT QUALIFIER:

• Name:  VERSION
  
• Definition:   Information identifying the version of the standard being referenced (e.g., a year of publication, a version number, etc.).
  
• Comment:  Not infrequently, unique identification of a content or process standard is a function of both an identifier and a version. While an identifier within a given standard scheme may remain constant across versions of the standard, its content may vary from version to version (i.e., the identifier is rendered non-unique); therefore, unique identification under such circumstances may require both an identifier and a version.
  
  

VALUE QUALIFIER(S):

• Standards information would be drawn from publicly recognized and publicly available schemes promulgated by recognized organizational, professional, academic, vocational, and governmental bodies.

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Draft Recommendation #2:
DC.Relation Element Qualifier

The second proposal relies on the use an element qualifier for the Dublin Core RELATION element.

ELEMENT NAME	ELEMENT QUALIFIER NAME	VALUE QUALIFIER (CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES)	DEFINITION
RELATION			A reference to the education or training standard with which the resource is associated.
	ConformsTo		The URI of the standard being associated at whatever level of granularity is required (i.e., standard, benchmark, etc.).

Proposal #2 may be illustrated as follows:

Draft Recommendation

ELEMENT:

• Name:  RELATION (already exists)
  

ELEMENT QUALIFIER:

• Name:  ConformsTo (or some other name that captures the notion)
  
• Definition:  The URI of the standard being associated at whatever level of granularity is required (i.e., standard, benchmark, etc.).
  
• Comment:  A pointer to the external location of the standard as maintained by the standards-promugating body. However, the reference must point to the exact level of the standard being referenced and not merely to the standards as a whole.
  
  

VALUE QUALIFIER:

• None
  

Recognized Issues with Proposal #2

While proposal #2 comports well with the “One-to-One” rule, its elegance masks possible short-term difficulties.

• The solution needs a mechanism for the “relation” element to unambiguously “point” to discrete locations deeply embedded in a standards document (a pointer to a textual representation is simple; a pointer to a digitally available instantiation is not so simple).

• In the long term, unique identifiers will solve the problem of needing to execute a search directly using a reference to a standard. But that is not possible now.

• Human users will want to search for resources associated with specific standards. But in the future, machines will be collecting the information for further synthesis. But this is not close enough to be useful for us now.

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Justification for Draft Recommendations

Justification Questions:

1. Can “it” be clearly described?

   Yes.  “A reference to the education or training standard with which the resource is associated.”

   Note: Homonym Problem–The term “standard” has multiple meanings potentially leading to confusion; however, Working Group discussions led to no better term to express the concept.

2. Is there a clear requirement for “it” in support of resource discovery in the education domain?

   Yes.  Increasingly, educational resources are either being designed to meet the needs of specific content and process standards, or are being associated with such standards after creation. Being able to search for resources tha meet the goals of specific standards is growing in importance as more educational processes become standards-based.

   Example Searches:

   • A 4^th grade teacher in Texas is looking for resources that support the Texas Essential Skills for 4^th grade science.
   • A math teacher is looking for resources that conform to the National Council of the Teachers of Math (NCTM) standards for teaching 8^th grade algebra.
   • A parent engaged in home teaching is looking for resources that meet a specific reading comprehension standard in his or her state or province.
   • An aggregator of educational content is searching for resources associated with a specific content standard.

3. Does “it” support interoperability?

   Yes.  With registries/repositories for content and process standards, varying degrees of interoperability can be achieved. For example, in the United States, an organization named “Achieve” (formed through the efforts of state governors) has cross-mapped content standards for over forty states in order to achieve a level of “interoperability” among resources associated with those standards.

4. Is “it” practical?

   Yes.  Many educational departments at all levels of government wanting to support standards within their jurisdictions will mandate the association of resources to their standards. Many commercial providers and other content creators wanting to make their resources easy to find it, will associate those resources with one (or more) recognized standards.

5. Does “it” refine an existing element?

   Possibly.  As noted above, one of the possible implementations involves a refinement of the existing RELATION element. However, it is not clear that the use of the RELATION element can achieve the goal at this time.

6. Are there alternative ways of implementing “it”?

   Possibly.  As noted above, one of the possible implementations involves a refinement of the existing RELATION element. However, it is not clear that the use of the RELATION element can achieve the goal at this time.

7. Are there existing implementations or controlled vocabularies, etc., supporting “it”?

   Yes.  The standards to be represented exist as formal schemes developed by recognized promulgating bodies–e.g., the US’ “NCTM” (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics); the UK’s “NVQ” (National Vocational Qualification); and the Australian Qualifications Framework. Metadata repositories (e.g., GEM) are using an element to capture standards information.

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Revision History:

15 March 2000:

1. Removes the “Australia’s ‘NGS’ (National Goals of Schooling)” language and substitutes “the Australian Qualifications Framework” in the list of controlled scheme exemplars.

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