IEEE LOM

IEEE LOM is an open standard. LOM or Learning Object Metadata is meant to make it easy for people in education to find educational content when applied to technology supported learning.

The opportunity

In the Dutch OTRS system, a Dutch organisation asked if they could copy the Wikipedia content in their Content Management System (CMS) to enable them to rate Wikipedia content according to the Edustandaard. Edustandaard is a Dutch implementation of IEEE LOM and is particularly targeted for primary and secondary education.

How IEEE LOM is organised

The IEEE LOM data is a fixed set of metadata, many of the values are fixed and can be localised for usage in another language. Many values can be generated because of the the type of information we have; we can provide keywords because categories are nothing but keywords, we know the URL of an article, we know the name of the article.

Why Wikimedia should host its IEEE LOM data

Categorising information is an expensive business. Many subjects covered in Wikipedia can be found in many languages. When an article is categorised for IEEE LOM in one language, it is possible through the interwiki links to add categorisation information to the linked articles. As a result the IEEE LOM information only needs to be completed and, as a result any secondary categorisation will be less expensive

Much of the educational conten that is categorised is proprietary; it is one way of atracting customers. When the Wikimedia content is categorised using the IEEE LOM standard, the information is opened up to the people in education. This helps us achieve our aims.

How and where to host the IEEE LOM data

At this moment I am aware of what the information is like and I do not have a clue how it is to be made available. The information could be hosted on a seperate tab with the articel (similar to the discussion tab). This tab will be shown to people who are interested in this information; this is selectable in the user preferences. Everyone who is interested can work on this metadata. The way this data is structured. It is expected that the IEEE LOM structures are adhered to.

The data is stored in a database that is connected to the Mediawiki database. It is an extension as many organisations will have no need to host IEEE LOM data. Some projects will have no need for the IEEE LOM data, I think Wiktionary is one of them.

Dependencies

When much of the data is automatically generated based on the interwiki data, it becomes crucial that the quality of the interwiki links are enhanced. The article a new look at the interwiki link is one way of improving the interwikis.

Much of the IEEE LOM labels have a localised content. This kind of localisation can be done using Ultimate Wiktionary functionality.

Coordination

The IEEE LOM standard knows many localisations. When we are to host the IEEE LOM data, we need to coordinate this localisation of data. We can find funding that pays for someone to do this for us.

Existing IEEE LOM data

There are organisations that have already categorised some of our content. It would be a good thing to integrate this information into the WMF IEEE LOM data.

December 2005 update

On the I&I conference in the Netherlands, many applications were demonstrated that make use of an implementation of IEEE LOM. One important impediment to the functionality is the availability of content that has the IEEE meta data. It is widely believed that the native implementation of this functionality in Mediawiki and for the data in Wikipedia would have a major impact for the innovation of education.