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Les Kneebone & Pru Mitchell Curriculum in the cloud 1 November 2013 Linking education through vocabularies
description
Presentation by Pru Mitchell and Les Kneebone for the Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) Seminar: Link by link: data integration and the evolving web held on 1 November 2013. Australia is implementing a machine-readable school curriculum published as RDF. Curriculum objectives are described using concepts from the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT), a subject vocabulary used in education metadata and school library catalogues since 2003. This presentation uses the experience of several Education Services Australia metadata projects to highlight the benefits and challenges for libraries entering the world of linked data.
Transcript of Curriculum in the cloud
Les Kneebone & Pru Mitchell
Curriculum in the cloud
1 November 2013
Linking education through vocabularies
Cataloguing the niche
• Why niche catalogues and vocabularies?
• Non-subject vocabularies • How many vocabularies can we
sustain?
Reynolds, Leo 2006, niche, CC-by-nc-sa
What’s different about school libraries?
• Literacy
• Content
• Curriculum
• Budget
• Stand alone
Global@St Peter’s Woodlands, CC-by-nc
Education Services Australia
• not-for-profit, ministerial company to provide services to the Standing Council on School Education and Early Childhood (SCSEEC)
• infrastructure and content to support national initiatives such as the Australian Curriculum and National Professional Standards for Teachers
• services: SCIS, Curriculum Press, myfutureScOT thesaurus, edu.au domain registrar, Scootle
esa.edu.au
Schools Catalogue Information Service
• Quality: standards-based, consistent
• Scope: Australian/NZ education K-12
• Classification: relevant to schools
• Efficiency: cost and effort• Quick: bulk download by ISBN• Terminology: subject headings
appropriate
1.6 million+ catalogue records
10,000+ e-books10,000+ educational websites 3,000+ learning objects 2,500+ digital video files 1,000+ audio books 100+ apps
What does SCIS provide?
1 July 2013 statistics
Form of resources catalogued by SCIS 2012-13
1. aligning Australian Curriculum with existing resources
2. enabling e-resource access to mobile devices
3. developing formal information literacy programs
Top issues facing school libraries
Softlink 2013 Australian School Library Survey
D’Andrea, E 2009, Cat cloud CC-by-sa
Australian Curriculum
australiancurriculum.edu.au
Architecture of the curriculum
Learning Areas
• English• Mathematics• Science• History• Geography
• Arts F-10• Health & Phys Ed F-10• Civics and Citizenship 3-10• Economics & Business 5-
10• Languages F-10• Technologies F-10• Work Studies 9-10
Cross-curriculum priorities
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures
• Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia
• Sustainability
Resourcing the curriculum
School libraries support implementation
of curriculum in their school
School library catalogues provide access tolearning resources
for the school communityACARA General Capabilities
Scootle
www.scootle.edu.au
Controlled vocabularies
"High levels of precision and recall, the two ways in which we judge any information retrieval system, are dependent on controlled vocabularies and national and international standards - they cannot be obtained by other systems not involving human intervention.”
Michael Gorman foreword to Conversations with Catalogers in the 21st Century, Libraries Unlimited, 2011 (p. viii)
How do vocabularies help search?
• Faceted search• Navigation• Redirects (synonyms)• See also• Mapping between repositories
Resources to research
Curriculum to curriculum
scot.curriculum.edu.au/search.asp
ScOT thesaurus
scot.curriculum.edu.au
o About school curriculum and the teaching professiono 9232 conceptso 10 top conceptso 9441 broader/narrower
relationso 7775 alternate labels/
synonymso Used since 2003 for tagging
education resourceso Used since 2011 to tag the
Australian Curriculum
About ScOT
Potter, J 2008, Fortune found my yarnCC-by-nc-sa
Vocabulary structure?
• ScOT is used to describe Australian Curriculum
Curriculum content description
ScOT is used to describe Australian Curriculum
o 1000+ content descriptions tagged
o 5 curriculum areaso ACARA endorsed
metadata
20,000+ resources tagged in Scootle
350,000+ resources tagged in SCIS MARC records
o Common vocabularyo Leverage past taggingo Exploit hierarchy
Inference
Curriculum
Link content with high correlation of
SCOT tagsAlignment between resources and curriculum may be inferred via ScOT
ScOT in Australian Curriculum
up to 14 hierarchy levels
Hierarchy levels
Curriculum
Link content with high correlation of
SCOT tags
Broader / Narrower relationships used to expand inferences
Exploiting the hierarchy
o infers content descriptions using the ScOT hierarchy
o leverages investment in ScOT tagging
o supports collection data mining
o underpins search applications
Curriculum Connect
o system integration
o enhance search indexes
o build navigation
o redirect synonyms
o Curriculum Connect federated query
o infer curriculum > ScOT > resources
o SPARQL + RESTful
API
http://vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au/scot/2458
Ecosystems
Biodiversity; Biogeochemical cycles; Bioindicators; Biomes; Competition (Ecology); Ecological niches; Ecological succession; Food webs; Habitats; Land degradation; Native species; Populations (Ecology); Symbiosis
Ecology
Use for resources about communities of living organisms interacting with each other and with their environment, including the processes that take place.
生態系 ; 生态系统 ; Mātauranga taupuhi kaiao; Ekosistem; بيئي Ökosystem; Οικοσύστημα; Ecosistema; 생태계 ;نظام ;
Hệ sinh thái; Ekosistem; Ecosistema; पा�रि�स्थि�तिक �त्र; Écosystème
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85040752#concept
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Ecosystem
Multilingual
13 languages
• Easier to consult over / crowd-source• Benefits of managing a vocabulary as RDF• Rich features• Change management of deprecated and
replacement concepts
Why publish your vocabulary?
What does a vocabulary require?
• Scope statement• Unique ID for concepts
• to aid updating of multiple systems, and• to aid translation into multilingual thesaurus
• References • URI for semantic web • Licence• Web publishing tools
standards – policies – managers - users
Publishing tools
Ontology editorsen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_editor
www.poolparty.biz
• SKOS
• Non-education vocabularies
• My concept matches your concept
Mapping vocabularies
More curriculum vocabularies
658 Curriculum Element
Curriculum vocabularies in MARC
Ben Chadwick: Demonstrator 2013
Ben Chadwick: Demonstrator 2013
e-Portfolio
teacherstandards.aitsl.edu.au/elements
Useful links
Pages URL
ScOT scot.curriculum.edu.au
Solutions scot.curriculum.edu.au/solutions
Curriculum Connect scot.curriculum.edu.au/indexing
API vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au/PoolParty/sparql/scot
Downloads vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au
ScOT blog schoolsonlinethesaurus.edublogs.org
SCIS blog scis.edublogs.org
