ADLRR2010: Tech, Interop, Models Panels:

Joel Thierstein, Rice Uni

Connexions: Rice repository platform. 16k modules, 1k collections
Started as elec eng content local to rice, now k-12, community college, lifelong learning, all disciplines
modularised structure: all content can be reused; more freedom at board of studies level, building on a common core
module makes for more efficient updating
"Lenses": social software to do peer review of content
Permanent versioning -- there will be multiple answers given by the source
CC-BY licensing, can buy hard copy as well as getting online pdf or epub.
Can be customised as platform: local branding; k-12 can zone off content for their own purposes
Want to make it available to the world


David Massart, EU Schoolnet

Federation of 30 learning object repositories in EU
Move content to user, not user to content: so very hard to control user access
Driven by metadata, to access content and arrange access to services
Tech interop: most components are in place -- search protocols, harvest and push protocols, metadata profiles; still need repository of repositories to discover repositories, with associated registry description, including autoconfigure of service access. At most need to establish best practice.
The problem no is semantic interop: meaningful queries.
Though theoretically everything is LOM, lots of application profiles, so need repositories of application profiles as well. With that done, can start recording each profile's controlled vocabularies, then crosswalks between the vocabularies, then transformations from one application profile to another.
ASPECT project is trying to do this all now: vocabulary bank, crosswalk, transformation service; trying to work out what would go into an application profile registry.
Dramatic knowledge building: some national repositories were not even up on LOM at the start


Valerie Smothers, MedBiquitous

MedEdPortal: not just learning objects, but learning plans, curricula: structure.
They routinely partner with other repositories. This has had blockers: no standard for packaging content (IMS not applicable to them.)
Peer review, and professional credit for submissions; but this means reviewers need to access files, different downloads every week.
Taxonomies are big in medicine, but don't cover medical education well.
They need fed search into MedEdPortal from other collections; they are reluctant to import other collections or refer out to them, because of how stringent they are.
LOM is profiled. Tracking reuse, and identifying reasons for reuse. Off the shelf products don't support profiles.
Interest in harnessing social networking, and Friend Of A Friend information.


Christophe Blanchi, CNRI

Identifiers are key to digital infrastructure. Ids have to be usable by systems as well as humans, provide client what they need in different contexts.
Identifiers often not interoperable. Syntactic interoperability: has been address with standards; problem is now different communities using different, non-native identifiers. Semantic interoperability: how to tell whether they mean the same thing? Functional interoperability: what can I do with the identifier? You don't always know what you'll get when you act on the identifier. Community interoperability: policy, site of the most silo'ing of identifiers. Persistence interoperability with the future.
Want to provide users with granular access. Recommendation: identifiers should provide user a glimpse of what the resource is. Identifiers resolving to self-defining descriptions. Identifiers must be polymorphic. Identifiers must be mapped to their intrinsic behaviours (typing, cf. MIME).