Skip navigation.
Home
Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content
Home

Example of ASPECT Results: Application Profile Registry

The Application Profile Registry (APR) describes the metadata application profiles used to describe learning resources managed in different learning object repositories. The APR allows ‘core standards’ such as IEEE LOM to be defined in terms of the elements within the standard’s published data model. It also provides links to externally-held and authoritative documents such as schemas for technology bindings, specifications and guidance. The APR is available at the following URL: http://apr.vocman.org

When a profile of a core standard is created, the APR automatically populates the profile with details about the core standard; this allows the author to modify these details rather than having to populate the entire profile from scratch. Elements in the APR are defined in terms of their obligation, size, order, vocabulary and data type. Elements can be used in multiple profiles and can be modified for a particular profile (e.g., to use a different controlled vocabulary). References to controlled vocabularies are made by linking to the URIs that are provided for that vocabulary by the Vocabulary Bank for Education developed in the project. The APR provides mappings between profiles, highlighting differences. The APR provides this information via a human readable interface and via a RESTful machine API.

The APR was designed to support the following functional requirements:

  • Storage of descriptive information about application profiles conforming to a specified schema (including their location)
  • Authentication of users
  • Role assignment for users
  • Storage of application profile bindings; this is available in case the profiles have no public location.
  • Web-based browsing
  • Client based browsing
  • Web based data management (add, delete, update, register for changes)
  • Web based administrative functions (change permissions, add, user, delete user)
  • Client-based searching
  • Web-based searching
  • Change Notification

Figure 1: The Application Profile Registry

Figure 1: The Application Profile Registry

Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the APR with the application profiles that are currently stored:

  • The IEEE LOM standard
  • The LRE metadata application profile
  • The ICOPER application profile

The rest of this section presents the mappings between application profiles, a key use case of the Application Profile Registry.

Summary: A person wants to see the mapping between two application profiles that are registered in the APR.

Actors: Any Person

Trigger: Triggered by the actor

Description:

The users navigate to the “mappings” page of the APR web application. 
The system asks the source and the target application profiles.
The user selects the source and the target application profiles.
The system returns the mapping between the requested profiles. 

Result: An overview is presented to the user that maps each metadata element of the source application profile to the metadata element of the target application profile. This overview is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Mapping one application profile to another

Figure 2: Mapping one application profile to another

Other significant results from work package 2 include learning object repository registries, a Vocabulary Bank for Education, metadata validation services, metadata enrichment services, a broken link checker, a social data manager, etc. A complete description of these tools and services can be found in deliverables D2.5 Infrastructure and services v1.0, D2.6 Infrastructure and services v2.0 and D2.7 Infrastructure and services v3.0.