I'm not going to take exhaustive notes on any of the paper sessions, unless someone says something particularly interesting. All of the papers are online for your reading pleasure.
Having said that, here are some random notes and observations:
Day spoke about metadata registries, a topic I'm not all that interested in. But, he did note that metadata is expensive, and will likely become more expensive. Good point, and one that often gets lost...
I attended a special session on "Smart Metadata." One of the speakers talked about learning objects. This is an area that keeps coming up, and I need to look a bit closer into this concept. In an attempt to do just that, I attended the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) plenary session. These are the folks behind the Learning Objects Metadata standard. I was hoping to hear a bit about the standard, and maybe some about how it is being used today. Instead, I got a couple of hours on the standards-making process and the IEEE org chart. It was about as exciting as you think it is. Good thing I had wireless access...
Still in the realm of education, a more useful talk was that of John Kendall of Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL). Kendall spoke about the "Use of Metadata for the Identification and retrieval of Resources for K-12 Education. McREL has compiled standards from across the nation into a searchable system. Kendall's talk focused on creating a schema that would allow educational resources to be tagged and retrieved based on a variety of educational standards. It looks to be interesting work, and I'll need to take a closer look at the paper.
Shifting gears, I attended a session on project management. A number of informed observers noted that this was a new topic to the Dublin Core, and also a bit of an odd one. I had high hopes. There are quite a number of areas in the project management world that could benefit from metadata-driven information systems. Project planning, tracking, and communication would seem to be areas where metadata could help make a difference. Although the speakers were not bad, they seemed to focus primarily on metadata for project outcomes. So the question shifted from "how do you use metadata in project management?" to "how do you use metadata to track the documents produced by a project?" This is still an interesting question, and a difficult one for large organizations with big projects (representatives from NASA and Boeing spoke on this panel). But it seems quite close to the traditional world of archives and corporate libraries.
Another speaker in this group, Barbara Richards from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, mentioned a system for tracking projects at a high level. The hope, I believe, was that others could use the system to learn information about projects similar to their own. This system tracked information such as:
Richards mentioned that other systems contained information about the target audiences, impacts, and sustainability of the projects.
I know that this idea of being able to track projects, for both knowledge management and measurement of goals, is growing in importance.
Posted by Karl
September 29, 2003 01:22 PM