I was in Copenhagen last week, at the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 2016 conference, where I ran a workshop about LRMI entitled “Building on Schema.org to describe learning resources” (as one of my colleagues pointed out, thinking of the snappy title never quite happened). Here’s a quick overview of it.

There were three broad parts to the workshop: presentations on the background organisations and technology; presentations on how LRMI is being used; and a debate where attendees got to think about what could be next for LRMI.

Fundamentals of Schema.org and LRMI

An introduction to Schema.org (Richard Wallis)

A brief history of Schema.org, fast becoming a de facto vocabulary for structured web data for sharing with search engines and others to understand interpret and load into their knowledge graphs. Whist addressing the issue of simple structured markup across the web it is also through its extension capabilities facilitating the development of sector specific enhancement that will be widely understood.

An Introduction to LRMI (Phil Barker)

A short introduction to the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative, originally a project which developed a common metadata framework for describing learning resources on the web. LRMI metadata terms have been added to Schema.org. The task group currently works to support those terms as a part of Schema.org and as a DCMI community specification.

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Use of LRMI

Overview of LRMI in the wild  (Phil Barker)

The results of a series of case studies looking at initial implementations are summarised, showing that LRMI metadata is used in various ways not all of which are visible to the outside worlds. Estimates of how many organisations are using LRMI properties in publicly available websites and pages, and some examples are shown.

The Learning Registry and LRMI (Steve Midgley)

The learning registry is a new approach to capturing, connecting and sharing data about learning resources available online with the goal of making it easier for educators and students to access the rich content available in our ever-expanding digital universe. This presentation will explain what the Learning Registry is, how it is used and how it used LRMI / Schema.org metadata. This will include what has been learned about structuring, validating and sharing LRMI resources, including expressing alignments to learning standards, validation of json-ld and json-schema.

[On the day we failed to connect to Steve via skype, but here are his slides that we missed]

What next for LRMI?

I presented an overview of nine ideas that LRMI could prioritise for future work. These ideas were the basis for a balloon debate, which I will summarise in more detail in my next post.