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By Alexa Joyce - July 2000
Alexa Joyce reports on the European Treasury Browser [1],the European Schoolnet's [2] web-based educational resource infrastructure for schools in Europe, linking together existing national, local or specialised repositories, encouraging new online publication, and providing a reliable level of quality and structure.
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Why do we need yet another browser system to add to the many we already have? At European Schoolnet, we are constantly on the look out for high quality teaching and learning resources. But online learning materials for schools - pupils and teachers - are difficult to find and publish. Considering the limited time that teachers have to prepare lesson plans, it's obvious that they need quick and easy-to-use resources. Also, schools and colleges all over Europe already have many digital and non-digital materials of their own - by sharing them internationally cash-strapped institutions could save time and money, while maintaining a high standard of teaching.
The aim of the European Treasury Browser project is to build a Web-based educational resource for the whole of Europe. By using a metadata networking infrastructure to link together existing national repositories, we also hope to stimulate new publication, and provide a reliable level of quality and structure. Via its thesaurus and multilingual metadata solutions, the project allows searching of resources Europe-wide in a choice of languages.
Furthermore, the project aims to add value to these systems by adding a user-friendly layer to help teachers and students locate resources using the Schoolnet Information Space with rules to facilitate location of relevant resources. The users want access to all data repositories, whatever indexing method is used.
The user should only obtain the most relevant resources for their own needs. This rich information space can become a vast source of educational material classified according to subject and resource type for use by teachers in preparing lessons, and by students for reference and research, or guidelines and best practice for education managers.
The ETB formats, stores, categorises, labels and filters information. This is essential in today's climate of information "flooding" - currently search engines and other tools produce so many results that we simply do not have time to look at them all. The project also addresses the problem of filtering - by producing an edited database, educators can be sure that content will be free of illegal or harmful content such as pornography or hacker/cracker sites.
The keyword of this project is QUALITY. Certainly, a general problem of the Internet for schools is the easy access to qualitative and relevant material. At a national level, this is basically dealt with by establishing databases firmly linked to the national curriculum. The National Grid [3] in the UK and the Educsource in France seem to be two examples in this respect. However, most of them are still not based on the selection of quality criteria. Measuring the quality of resources refers to the actual benefits of the introduction of these resources in the educational process. To become a resource for schools, information coming from different contexts, from different education systems, which has been produced for different projects, with particular characteristics, must be organised, structured in such a way which can be easily recognised by every one. It must be structured on the basis of a data model and standards, which constitute "conventions" or European standards, which can be easily understood beyond national and local contexts
There is an obvious need for metadata harmonisation between different initiatives and communities, both within the school sector and other communities. For the European Treasury Browser, this is tackled in a new way. The approach acknowledges the different levels of metadata harmonisation, like: encoding, transfer protocol, semantics, query language/protocol, retrieval of search results, controlled vocabularies.
ETB uses an extension of the Dublin Core [4] semantics and its RDF/XML name space for basic elements, HTTP for metadata transfer and RDF for metadata encoding as well as for data modelling for metadata not supported by the Dublin Core (DC) and Dublin Core Qualifier Name spaces (DCQ), in the next generation of products we maximize our chances for inter-operability. An API to interface to existing metadata repositories and intelligent authoring tools will be developed.
ETB closely integrates a developed subject thesaurus into the metadata infrastructure. The thesaurus is Web enabled and described through an RDF data model and/or the Zthes profile of Z39.50. The thesaurus distribution format will be based on XML. ETB software tools will re-configure based on thesaurus updates. All this allows the creation of both intelligent metadata authoring tools, and accurate muliti-lingual, search systems.
Even to make possible or to facilitate monolingual searching, a monolingual thesaurus is a great advantage: If there are more than several thousand resources (or documents or document like objects) a controlled vocabulary is needed for targeted searching. This is much more important if the resources are coming from different languages. To describe and find the same topics, which are given in different languages, a translation of the indexing vocabulary is needed. In the educational area there exists an additional problem because of the different educational systems in the countries or even in the regions: the right elements describing for instance the different school levels have to be matched across the languages or cultures. A multilingual ontology has been developed by ETB for the specific school area as a top level indexing framework. Supporting of the retrieval can be done at the input level and/or at the search level. On both levels a thesaurus can be helpful. When the indexing is done by the author/publisher of a single resource it supports the search process very effectively. The multilingual thesaurus will also be integrated into the system's configuration and support Search interfaces and the search algorithms.
Some users may have some foreign language knowledge, but their proficiency may not be good enough to formulate queries to appropriately express their information needs. Such users will benefit enormously if they can enter their queries in their native language, because they are able to examine relevant documents even if they are untranslated. Monolingual users, on the other hand, can use translation aids to help them understand their search results. In general, users need to achieve more accuracy and reliability in cross-lingual information indexing and retrieval. The users of the school platforms should have the real chance to find information or resources which are originally written in an other language in order to get in contact with pupils and teachers in other countries or regions studying the same or very closely related topic. They also must have the chance to understand at least roughly what is described in the other resources and whether these resources are valuable for their interest. Therefore cross-lingual information retrieval and translation facilities or tools are imperative.
Despite using some highly technical methods for creating the European Treasury Browser, for users the ETB is relatively simple. Resources are wide ranging, offering useful descriptions and links in each subject area. Our current favourites are:
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Alexa Joyce
European Schoolnet
Rue de Trèves 61
Brussels
1040
Belgium
alexa.joyce@eun.org
<http://www.eun.org>
Phone: 00 322 790 7560
Alexa Joyce is employed at European Schoolnet
, a web community and
portal for teachers, pupils and other education professionals.
She is responsible for the European Knowledge Centre newsletter,
coming up with new features, researching the link repository and
playing annoying techno in the office.
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For citation purposes:
Joyce, A. "Browse Through Europe's Educational Treasures",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/etb/>
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