Towards Linked Education Data: Metadata Extraction Projects for Education Network Australia (edna)

Abstract

This project report describes three different but related projects for edna (Education Network Australia), all of which undertake metadata extraction from a range of sources to facilitate the semantic annotation of collections of learning resources for Australian educators. A team of Information Officers at edna is responsible for building and maintaining a large collection of web-based learning resources with associated metadata. This process has been largely a manual approach at the individual item level. In an attempt to enhance the relevance and efficiency of edna’s own collection, a two-pronged approach has been taken: on the one hand harvesting user selection, evaluation and metadata through social bookmarking tools and on the other employing some automated metadata creation tools to increase efficiency of description. It is envisaged that user engagement will augment the quality, relevance and currency of the resources in edna for the community of users and the rich metadata collected from users and automated tools will enhance the metadata and extend the discoverability of the collection.