"Co-led by the Association of Educational Publishers --the 501(c)(3) division of the Association of American Publishers-- and Creative Commons, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the LRMI has developed a common metadata framework for describing or 'tagging' learning resources on the web. This framework is a key first step in developing a richer, more fruitful search experience for educators and learners. ... The LRMI was spurred by the announcement in 2011 of Schema.org, a project by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! to create a standard way of tagging online content. ... The metadata schema developed by the LRMI was adopted by Schema.org in April 2013, meaning that anyone who publishes or curates educational content can now use LRMI markup to provide rich, education-specific metadata about their resources with the confidence that this metadata will be recognized by major search engines." -- http://www.lrmi.net/about

Work on the LRMI specification began in 2011 with the creation of a LRMI Advisory Board^[10] and a Technical Working Group^[11] charged with developing a community-based specification as the education extension for schema.org. Engagement of the broader education metadata community was handled during development through a Google Group ^[12]. Stuart Sutton, DCMI Managing Director & DC-Education Community co-chair served on the Technical Working Group. Others on the Technical Working Group with close ties to DCMI include Dan Brickley (schema.org) and Phil Barker (Cetis, UK).

The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons (CC) have asked that stewardship of the LRMI specification be placed with DCMI at the September closure of Gates funding for LRMI development. From inception, the overall planning for the LRMI specification included the orderly transition of development outcomes from its grant-funded beginnings under the leadership of AEP and Creative Commons to a permanent context managed by an organization with the capacity to provide ongoing stewardship for long-term sustainability, access, and orderly future development. As the funded start-up phase of LRMI was coming to a close, an exploratory team comprised of representatives from AEP, Creative Commons, and the LRMI community was formed and has been actively and systematically engaged in evaluating an array of potential candidates for such stewardship. The exploratory team recommended DCMI because it's open community goals and processes are congruent with those that have emerged within LRMI during its short development history and because of DCMI's reputation and track record in development and principled stewardship of metadata specifications used in the Web context.

This LRMI Task Group of the DC-Education Community is charged with defining and executing a technical transition plan for declaration of the LRMI specification as a DCMI Community Specification to provide the context for such stewardship.

This LRMI Task Group will supplant the current LRMI Technical Working Group^[13] (although current members may express interest in serving). It is anticipated that this TG will be permanent within DC-Education with discrete, clearly stated work packages that define the scope and timeline of work at any point in time. Particular work packages may require shifts in TG personnel including both chairs and contributing members depending on the mix of needed expertise and interests given work package content and context. Future TG work is dependent on needs expressed through community input and subject to:

interest, expertise and commitment by members of the community to execute the work; and
open review and comment.

Motivation

The schema.org initiative^[14] aims at providing terms that webmasters can embed in Web pages to improve search results. For simplicity of adoption, the initiative is defining all of its terms in its own namespace even where adopting terms already defined in other namespaces. In 2011, DCMI created a Task Group,^[15] co-chaired by Dan Brickley and Tom Baker, to define and publish formal mappings where Schema.org terms overlap with DCMI metadata terms. Thus, schema.org has been of specific interest to DCMI in the context of DCMI terms namespaces since 2011. In addition, schema.org has been of general interest to DCMI and its members since it is a significant addition to the metadata ecosystem that has gained considerable traction through implementation. Thus, schema.org is a force in the metadata ecosystem and must be part of DCMI's "sense making" role within the metadata community. Therefore, the LRMI's role and its sustainability as an education extension for schema.org are of inherent interest for DCMI.

This general interest in schema.org, and, by inference, LRMI, is quite particular to the DC-Education Community (DC-Ed). Created in 1999, DC-Ed is DCMI's oldest and second largest formal community with in excess of 200 jiscmail members. Over the past decade and a half, the Community has played a significant role in defining education specific properties in the dcterms namespace^[16] including: audience ^[17], conformsTo^[18], educationLevel^[19], instructionalMethod^[20], and mediator^[21]. Therefore, the long-term sustainability of LRMI's properties and maintenance of the connection to schema.org are of high interest to the DC-Ed Community.

Lastly, DCMI has entered into collaboration through the Digital Learning Metadata Alliance (DLMA)^[22] with other ad hoc and de jure standards-making bodies in the process of "sense making" in an inevitably diverse metadata ecosystem without which wide adoption of specifications is unlikely. Inaugural members include DCMI, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPL)^[23] and the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS)^[24]. The Alliance is dedicated to cooperative "sense making" in the context of education publishers, implementers of learning environments and supporting tools, and libraries (among other cultural memory institutions). One aspect is this cooperative "sense making" by DLMA will be the mapping of existing metadata schemas and data structures in wide practice to schema.org and it's educational extension, LRMI.

Participation

Contributing Members:

Angela Baker

Phil Barker

Dan Brickley

Lorna M. Campbell

Joseph Chapman

Stefan Dietze

Irvin Flack

Dave Gladney

Jim Goodell

Jason Hoekstra

Michael Jay

Steve Midgley

Brandt Redd

Stuart Sutton

Liaison to Technical Board & Community Specifications Committee:

Stuart Sutton

Communication

NOTE: Currently, the locus of LRMI community communications is an open Google Group that serves the same core functions as the DC-Education Jiscmail forum within DCMI. Both communication channels are open to any subscriber with an interest. Any member of the LRMI open Google Group is welcome (and will be welcomed) to join and participate on the DC-Education Jiscmail list.

LRMI Task Group forum list (DC-LRMI)

Subscribe: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=dc-lrmi&A=1

Preliminary configuration as public 'read' & member 'write' with archive and with subscription by owner (Sutton, Barker & Campbell)

DC-Education Community forum list (DC-Ed)

Subscribe: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?SUBED1=dc-education&A=1

Decision Policy

The DCMI/LRMI Task Group (TG) has been created and charged by the DC-Education Community (DC-Ed). A resulting assignment of a status of DCMI Community Specification to TG work product is a determination of the Community Specifications Committee (CSC). Deferential, expedited review by the DCMI Technical Board (TB) and the Governing Board (GB) will follow on the decision of the CSC. All relevant personnel recognize the compressed timeframe for action and that the LRMI transition presents novel circumstances of first impression for DCMI.

Task Group Scratchpad (Members Only)

Handbook: Table of Contents

Contents

LRMI Task Group Work Packages

Purculating[2] Community Matters (no particular order)

Task Group Background

Motivation

Participation

Communication

Decision Policy

Task Group Scratchpad (Members Only)

References

Purculating^[2] Community Matters (no particular order)