edna metadata application profile

edna metadata application profiles

The edna metadata application profile supports interoperability across all sectors of education and training in Australia in the area of online resource discovery and management. It comprises a set of metadata elements which are situated within the DCMI framework. Consistent with the extensibility principles of Dublin Core, the edna profile includes additional elements and element qualifiers to meet the specific application to the Australian education domain and to suit the operational requirements of edna.

The edna metadata application profile was updated in 2005 with the addition of news and events metadata elements; this was to enable more appropriate description, management and retrieval of news and events related items.

edna resources metadata application profile 1.0 (313 Kb)
- This document presents the different metadata elements used to describe resources, their refinements, description and the encoding schemas used. Details of encoding schemes developed by education.au can be found in an Appendix.

Events metadata application profile v1.3 (1695 Kb)
- This profile is used to describe events of interest to the Australian education and training community. It is used to to generate events calendars and to provide event feeds

Guiding principles

The edna metadata application profile is based on the following key objectives:

targeted resource discovery for online educational resources
a foundation grounded in international metadata standards initiatives, in particular the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and standards developed and promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
continuing interoperability with the DCMI as it introduces refinements to its specification
collaboration aimed at achieving and maintaining cross-sectoral consensus on a national education metadata framework and strategic directions for its evolution, while recognising sector-specific requirements within the standard - in effect this means consensus between edna and representatives from all the education sectors about an interoperable framework which also meets local needs of stakeholders
positioning for interoperability with other national and international standards and schema (including intellectual property) - with a view to maintaining a balance between generality and specificity (including consideration of DCMI, AGLS and IMS metadata)
adopting and promoting the use of authoritative Australian classification schema wherever possible
accommodating local values, such as state-specific learning outcomes information
providing advice to stakeholders on recommended best practice
pragmatic application, including consideration of all associated costs and overheads, to achieve baseline conformance to the standard.

edna recognises that individual communities within the Australian education and training sector will further extend and qualify the element set to meet local needs.

edna.edu.au