LRE Service Centre

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Contents

Introduction

The LRE Service Centre is one of the key outputs from the ASPECT project.

ASPECT is a 30-month, Best Practice Network (BPN) supported by the European Commission’s eContentplus programme and coordinated by European Schoolnet (EUN). It aims to improve the adoption of learning technology standards and specifications, including by feeding into the pre-standardisation debate, and ensuring that the needs of the European school sector is sufficiently taken into account in this debate. More specifically, ASPECT is exploring two categories of specifications: specifications for content use (e.g., content packaging formats, access control, and licensing) and specifications for content discovery (e.g., metadata, vocabularies, protocols, and registries).

As a result of this work, tools, services, and documentation are produced by ASPECT to support these best practices. These are gathered together (and will be maintained after the end of the ASPECT project) in the LRE Service Centre which is part of European Schoolnet’s Learning Resource Exchange service for schools.

This material covers the following domains:

  • Content Packaging Materials:
    • What is content packaging? What packaging formats exist? How do they differ?
    • How to package content and validate packages.
    • How to transcode (i.e., convert) content in a format into another format.
  • Metadata Management Materials:
    • The LRE Metadata Profile
    • Metadata validation
    • Metadata transformation
    • Metadata automatic translation
    • Learning object identification
    • Controlled vocabulary management
  • Repository Interoperability Materials:
    • Metadata search
    • Metadata harvesting

As the project moves forward and new material is produced, this Service Centre will be regularly updated.

Content Packaging

IMS Common Cartridge & ADL SCORM Demonstator

This demonstrator includes two videos introducing the ADL SCORM and IMS Common Cartridge specifications and their differences, scenarios for creating packages in these two formats and references to web-based and standalone tools to create, validate, and render packaged content.

SCORM2CC Trancoder

SCORM2CC is a utility for converting packages of e-learning content from the ADL SCORM Package Interchange File (PIF) format to the IMS Common Cartridge format. It operates in a batch mode, converting all the SCORM PIF files within a given directory into Common Cartridges.

Metadata Management

Profiling Metadata Specifications

A metadata application profile is the adaptation, constraint, and/or augmentation of a metadata scheme to suit the needs of a particular community, the intention being to define a profile of a specific schema for its application to a particular community.

  • The IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC) proposes IMS Application Profile Guidelines to help people creating conformant application profiles (meaning that all the instances that conform to the profile also conform to the specification it is based on).
  • SchemaProf is a tool that support the profiling of XML schemas in a conformant way.

The LRE Metadata Application Profile v4.0 (LREMAP4)

The LRE Metadata Application Profile v4.0 is conformant profile based on a combination of the IMS LODE ILOX and the IEEE LOM loose specification that is used by ASPECT to describe learning objects.

LREMAP4 Validation Tools

The LREMAP4 Validation Tools allows developers to test xml files for compliance with the “Learning Resource Exchange Metadata Application Profile Version 4.0”.

The ARIADNE Online Validation Service

The ARIADNE online validation service is an online version which can be used in the very early stages of the workflow, from the mapping process onwards. First a validation scheme has to be selected, which will activate the necessary validation components on the metadata. In this case you can select between ASPECTv1.0/core and ASPECTv1.0/recommended, where the latter is more restrictive (see the LRE Metadata Application Profile v4.0 for details about these two validation modes). After pasting the metadata record and pressing "validate" you will get a small report explaining which parts of the metadata can be improved to be compliant to the ASPECT application profile.

The ASPECT Test System

The ASPECT Test System allows developers to test xml files for compliance with the “LRE Metadata Application Profile Version 4.0. Please download here the version appropriate for your operating system and unzip it. The unzipped directory will contain at the top level the test system which you launch using a current Java Runtime Environment. After launching the test system, determine in the Configuration tab the directory where the reports should be saved. At the Test Packages tab Add the instance documents you intend to Validate.

More information on these validation tools can be found here.

Metadata Transformation

The metadata transformers consist of a set of Java libraries to turn metadata instances of an application profile into another application profile. This libraries can be

  • Used as standalone applications
  • Deployed as online services, or
  • integrated with other applications such as the ARIADNE Harvester (see below).

Currently, the following transformations are supported:

Automatic Metadata Translation and Learning Object Identification

The Automatic Metadata Translator and the Learning Object Identifier are two services integrated in the LRE. Each learning object referenced in the LRE receives a unique and persistent identifier (based on the CNRI Handle System). All the metadata collected by the LRE are machine translated from English into German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese using SYSTRAN.

Due to license costs, these services are currently limited to the LRE Associate Partners and ASPECT Associate Partners. Partners' metadata collections that contribute to the LRE are enriched with translations and identifiers and can be harvested back using the LRE OAI-PMH target (http://lrecoreprod.eun.org:6080/oaitarget/OAIHandler?verb=Identify).

Controlled Vocabulary Management

  • The Vocabulary Bank for Education (VBE) provides both a browsable and searchable web application for users to locate, view and download terminology, as well as standards-based machine to machine interfaces.
  • The Vocabulary Maintenance Management page discusses the benefits of using multilingual controlled vocabularies and the services around them.

Repository Interoperability

Metadata Search using SQI

The Simple Query Interface (SQI) is a CEN Workshop Agreement - CWA 15454 of the CEN Workshop on Learning Technologies. It is used to search metadata in a repository.

svn co https://lretools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lretools/trunk/LRE-Technical-Workshops <Your-local-directory>.
Alternatively, it can be downloaded at http://files.eun.org/download/tech/LRE-Technical-Workshops-Zip.zip.

Metadata Harvesting using OAI-PMH

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a specification proposed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest (i.e., mirror) metadata in a repository.

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