Metadata Revision

1 Description

At the time being we have Metadata and Advanced Metadata in ILIAS.

• Metadata is a proper tab that shows basic metadata ("Quick Edit") when opened, followed by several other sub-tabs for the entire LOM metadata set. Only a few object types support these metadata. In practice, authors fill out only the quick edit page while all other LOM metadata tabs are not used.
• Advanced Metadata (AMD) are becoming more and more popular in different ILIAS objects. They are used in courses to display additional information on how this course is used which are not covered by LOM. This information is displayed in object lists. Wikis are supporting AMD to cluster wiki pages and to show relations between pages.

The current concept and implementation of metadata has some general problems that force us to revise this feature:

• "Metadata" is always considered as LOM metadata. If an object type wants to support for example copyright information, it has to implement the entire LOM stuff because "Copyright" is part of the LOM set.
• Advanced Metadata are considered as something different to Metadata. They do not appear under the tab "Metadata" but as sub-tab of the object's Settings tab. This is often difficult to understand for users as they do not always know which data belongs to LOM and which not.
• Last but not least: the implementation of LOM metadata is very old and slightly outdated. This is why object types that have been added to ILIAS in the last years never support LOM metadata - and sometimes try to find a workaround for not using LOM but AMD.

I suggest to separate "Metadata" from "LOM" metadata and to use this term as the general term for such content description and classification. LOM metadata would be considered as a specific extension of metadata and should be enable/disable for every object (when they are needed, they could be used). "Advanced Metadata" are simply "Metadata" that are not covered by LOM.

2 Additional Information

• Idea / concept: Kunkel, Matthias [mkunkel]
• Interest in funding: ...
• Maintainer: Stefan Meyer, Leifos GmbH
• Development: Feature is to be developed by …
• Testcases / tested by …

3 Discussion

4 Implementation