Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

FAQ

Find the answers to common questions and concerns about LRMI here. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Click “Contact Us” below for a personal response to your query.

General Questions

What is the timeframe for the LRMI project?
The LRMI was launched in June 2011. Work has taken place in three phases.Phase I: June 2011-March 2012
AEP co-led Phase I of the project with Creative Commons with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The initial phase included:
- Convening a Technical Working Group of global metadata and education experts to draft a set of properties representing the most common descriptions of learning resources and addressing the contemporary desire to link learning resources to learning outcomes
- Explaining the impact, value, and use cases of a common education metadata framework to the general public, decision-, and policy-makers
- Convening an Advisory Group of educational content providers to inform and review the work of the Technical Working Group
- Informing the educational resource community of the project and encouraging feedback and discussion via the public mailing list (https://groups.google.com/group/lrmi) and LRMI website (www.lrmi.net)
- Submitting the draft specification to Schema.org to be considered for adoption as the standard online metadata schema for learning resources. View the proposal here: http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/LearningResources
Phase II: March 2012-April 2013
AEP was invited by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to continue work on the second phase of the LRMI, which focuses on adoption and implementation of the LRMI metadata specification. Activities for Phase II include:
- Producing a proof of concept of the LRMI specification to dempnstrate the value of the LRMI properties in a search environment and document the tagging process
- Analyzing the impact of LRMI on the educator community as well as the educational resource industry
- Informing and encouraging the Schema.org adoption process
- Providing ongoing education and support to the learning resource industry through instructional videos, webinars, and briefings at industry events, including ISTE, EdNET, and the Frankfurt Book Fair
Phase III: May 2013-June 2014 (tentative)
AEP is currently working with the Gates Foundation and Creative Commons to outline activities for the remainder of 2013 and into 2014. Please check back soon for details.
When will this framework be launched?
The current version of the LRMI specification, drafted by the LRMI Technical Working Group and reviewed through open comments from the public and industry leaders, was submitted in March 2012 to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) public mailing list for web vocabularies. This is the first step for all metadata schema being considered for inclusion in Schema.org, a project created by major search vendors Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex to develop a universal framework for tagging web-based content to provide a faster and richer search experience.
The proposal was officially accepted and incorporated into the full Schema.org hierarchy in April 2013. While we can’t speculate as to how or when search engines will use LRMI, Schema.org adoption should give content publishers confidence that LRMI tagging is a worthwhile investment.
Will AEP and Creative Commons be doing the metatagging themselves?
Publishers/creators will be responsible for tagging their content appropriately. AEP, with support from inBloom and contributions from Educational Systemics and Knovation, has already published two helpful LRMI user guides, and has plans to develop an extensive LRMI knowledge base on in 2013-14.
What is the outreach to companies that have already invested an enormous amount of time, money and effort into metatagging? Is there any sort of reconciliation?
The leadership of this initiative is aware that many organizations have already invested time and resources toward tagging and organizing educational content. Since it is not our intent to replace or negate any work that has been done in this field, and since the success of our endeavor relies heavily on interoperability, the first phase in the development of the schema for LRMI was reviewing existing standards. The technical working group did extensive outreach to the educational resource community to collect use cases and samples of frameworks in use.This project is also committed to transparency and public input. We invite you to view the archives of the public discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/lrmi or the LRMI Discussion Forums.
How will AEP and Creative Commons address the need for explicit specificity in the schema, while keeping the necessary simplicity in the metadata tags for this to be easily adopted industry-wide?
The LRMI framework is basic enough that it’s easily adoptable by content developers, easily implemented by search engines and other platform providers, and useful to the end user (for example, if the framework represents the filters by which teachers and learners can sort resources, too many options could complicate the search). The end goal is something that is simple, lightweight, and easily extensible (because metadata specifications are never set in stone).
This initiative will start with the creation of tags in accordance with the Common Core Standards. How will AEP and Creative Commons address tagging for those subject areas outside the Common Core?
While most discussion around educationalAlignment revolves around the Common Core State Standards, the LRMI enables alignment to any recognized educational framework. Aligning to frameworks other than the CCSS is a topic that will be addressed in forthcoming documentation.
In the future, are there plans for any sort of automated tagging for common tags?
While this functionality does not lie within the scope of the LRMI project, we foresee the development of plug-ins for publishing platforms that will mark up content according to the LRMI framework. We will keep the community apprised of tools like this if/when they become available.
Are there use restrictions on the schema?
No, the schema can be freely used by all. The supporting documentation on this website is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
How will I learn about progress of the project?
The website at LRMI.net is the hub for all things related to the project, including project background, a calendar of events, press releases, discussion forums, and the LRMI blog. You can also follow the #LRMI hashtag on Twitter.
What has been the process for gathering public input?
There were several opportunities for public comment throughout the development of the LRMI specification. The project continues to actively see feedback on the LRMI discussion board.

Technology questions

How does LRMI relate to other education metadata initiatives?
LRMI aims to establish a common metadata schema to identify learning resources that will complement learning standards, for example those encoded in the Achievement Standards Network, including Common Core State Standards for K12 (US), as well as all other online learning vehicles. Interoperability is a key precept of LRMI. While simplicity is necessary for mass adoption and search engine implementation, mixing with and mapping to other vocabularies will be possible — for example by mirroring the semantics of existing education metadata vocabularies (e.g., Learning Object Metadata) to the extent possible, so that explicit equivalences and refinements may be established, protecting existing investments in educational metadata made by publishers and curators of learning resources and by institutions to date.
Additionally, LRMI will begin by examining lessons from previous initiatives and real online descriptions of educational resources, whether machine-readable or not. In this, we aim to utilize the technology-agnostic aspects of the microformats process, described at http://microformats.org/wiki/process.
CC currently uses and recommends RDFa to describe its licenses and public domain tools and to express license and other information about works released under CC licenses. Doesn’t schema.org utilize microdata instead of RDFa?
In addition to using and recommending RDFa, CC was a significant contributor to the development of RDFa. We think RDFa is clearly the best technology for adding structured data to the web. Additionally, RDFa 1.1 is arguably just as simple and concise as microdata, while benefiting from years of open development, testing, and deployment. We wish schema.org had chosen to use RDFa 1.1.
However, without use by tools, metadata is nearly useless. Search engines are the fundamental tools of the web, and the three largest search engines have agreed to collaborate via schema.org on metadata vocabularies that some or all will utilize to provide enhanced search results. This ought to prove a tremendous win for structured data on the web, which CC has always envisioned as necessary for making openly licensed works maximally discoverable — using computers to facilitate sharing and collaboration rather than attempting to suppress the same. We are incredibly excited about this potential inflection in the use of structured data on the web.
What is microdata?
Microdata is a relatively new format for adding structured data to web pages. To the casual observer, it looks very much like RDFa, and it is. The main difference, from a high level, is that microdata has no direct heritage from RDF and the Semantic Web activity. This difference brings a set of technical and political trade-offs that are too nuanced to attempt to describe here.
What is schema.org?
Schema.org is a collaboration among the largest search engines to curate a collection of vocabularies that can be used to add structured data to web pages and enhance web search results. Schema.org uses microdata as the format to embed data using these vocabularies, but in theory other formats could be used.
What about interoperability?
RDF is easily extracted from microdata and schema.org vocabularies can be expressed as RDF, so any software utilizing RDF for aggregation and data integration ought to be able to continue to do so.
Most importantly, LRMI will develop its vocabulary as an abstract model, with schema.org and RDF representations; utilization by other metadata technologies will be eminently feasible. This would be crucial even if the situation with structured data and HTML was settled, as non-HTML and non-web applications will also realize value from a common education vocabulary.
How does microdata relate to XMP, which CC has recommended for metadata embedding in images and other file formats?
Microdata (like RDFa) is for adding metadata to web pages (technically RDFa has been used in other applications, and in theory microdata could be, but web pages are the overwhelming use case). XMP is complementary, as its use case is embedding metadata in media files. XMP uses a subset of RDF. Microdata can be mapped to RDF. The educational vocabulary LRMI develops will be usable in microdata, XMP, and many other metadata schemes.
How will schema.org play out? What does it mean for existing users of RDFa?
We can’t predict the future, of course! Schema.org seems poised to greatly increase the utility, and thus use, of structured data on the web, and with LRMI, CC will do its utmost to leverage this unique opportunity.However, it is too early to tell how the technical format (microdata) or the primary vocabulary aspects of schema.org will impact the web. The impact could be relatively narrow, in a few domains where it turns out structured data is a big win for search engines, searchers, and publishers, and that the domain vocabularies curated at schema.org drive this. The impact could be very broad if it turns out that schema.org is a scalable model for curating common vocabularies across many valuable domains.Given all of this, it is too early to tell (yes, this bears repeating) what schema.org means for existing users of RDFa. It is entirely possible that with adequate demand, schema.org will support RDFa as well as microdata, as Google’s pioneering Rich Snippets feature (which can be seen as a forerunner of schema.org) does.CC will mitigate these risks first by developing the LRMI vocabulary as an abstract model applicable to microdata, RDF (hence RDFa), and other metadata technologies, and second by developing the LRMI vocabulary in an open and transparent manner that builds on knowledge from previous initiatives (see question about other initiatives above).
My website is currently marked up with RDFa from the CC license chooser or my platform generates RDFa for CC licensed works. What will I have to change?
Nothing at this point. CC deeds, which currently consume RDFa to provide copy/paste attribution and license notice markup, will continue to consume RDFa; support for microdata will be an addition.As schema.org, LRMI, and subsequent initiatives bear fruit and best practices develop, you may wish to update your website or platform to take advantage of new capabilities.
Where can I find technical support for this change? How can I help?
For questions about and contributions specific to LRMI, please join http://groups.google.com/group/lrmi.
For questions and contributions not specific to the LRMI education vocabulary project, please join http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel.Your questions and comments will be very valuable in guiding us in these early stages. Please introduce yourself and do not be shy. We will especially need assistance in documenting other initiatives and use cases, and in later stages, testing vocabulary drafts in real applications. We’re looking forward to your participation!

Specification questions

Where is the property for subject area? Where would I put a value such as “Social Studies” or “Algebra”?
The “about” property that is a part of Schema.org already adequately accomplishes this goal. The LRMI specification only adds properties that are not already covered.
Why is there no property for grade level? “typicalAgeRange” is not how we normally define our content.
To ensure that the LRMI terms that are included with Schema.org are as useful as possible to an international audience it was decided to use a two-prong approach.
1. Use “typicalAgeRange” when that information is known and available. This can even be used when the only text visible on a webpage is the grade level, as long as there is a known and relatively agreed upon mapping between grade level and age range.An example would look like:This resource was written for an audience of 6th graders
2. Use the “educationalAlignment” term, in combination with the “alignmentObject” term, to model the grade level using some applicable standard in your jurisdiction/country/state/etc.To do this use the “alignmentType” term (which is a part of “alignmentObject”) and provide a value of “educationLevel.” Then either use “targetUrl” (if there exists a standard URL/URI for the grade level in question) or “targetName” to reference the grade level.An example would look like:This resource was written for an audience of <meta itemprop="alignmentType" content="educationalLevel"><meta itemprop="targetUrl" content="http://www.example.com/standards/grades/6/" />6th graders
Accessibility is very important in education; where are the terms that deal with accessibility in LRMI?
Although it is true that accessibility is very important in education, it is also greatly important in other areas of online content. As such, the LRMI Technical Working Group did not address that in favor of accessibility experts proposing an extension to Schema.org. This effort has been undertaken by the accessibility metadata group, with participation from IMS Global accessibility working group members, LRMI representatives and other industry experts. The website that describes this effort is a11ymetadata.org
Do all publishers and platforms (both commercial and Open Educational Resource) have to go through all of their content and align it to multiple educational standards now (e.g., Common Core State Standards)?
No. There is no requirement to use any part of the LRMI specification. However, if a publisher or platform chooses to align content to an education standard (for whatever reason) they now have a way to describe that alignment faithfully using LRMI.
My publisher/school/community/platform finds the use of another property not available in LRMI or Schema.org to be immensely valuable when searching for educational content. How can we use this property?
LRMI was started to extend Schema.org to better describe educational resources. If the combination of Schema.org/LRMI does not address all of your needs when publishing your educational material online then please join the LRMI mailing list and make the case for your new term/property. If the term/property is indeed novel and of great interest in the educational community the discussion should shift to the Schema.org vocabulary discussion mailing list.

Legal questions

How will the LMRI vocabulary be licensed?
All documentation, including the vocabulary itself, will be developed and published under a CC BY license. Documentation published on schema.org is published under CC BY-SA, so it is likely the schema.org version of the vocabulary will be published on schema.org under that license as well. Any software code developed by CC in support of LMRI will be released under CC0, or an existing open source software license if required by dependencies.In addition to using CC BY-SA for copyright, schema.org’s terms include a brief patent policy. Along with the rest of the community we are evaluating this and will provide feedback as needed.

The technology FAQs on this page are republished from Creative Commons with permission via the CC BY license. See the full CC LRMI FAQs.