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

Example of ASPECT Results: Vocabulary Manager

The Vocabulary Manager is a tool for inserting vocabularies into users’ application profiles. It was developed at the University of Koblenz, Knowledge Media Institute (IWM). The Vocabulary Manager allows a user to insert vocabularies that are located on his/her hard disk, available via the ASPECT Vocabulary Bank for Education or available via a web page link. The Vocabulary Manager is published under a Creative Commons License.

The Vocabulary Manager mainly works in four steps after the user has selected an application profile for inserting vocabularies.

  • First, the Vocabulary Manager unzips the profile into a temporary directory.

  • It searches for already existing vocabularies in the Vocabularies’ folder and parses the vocabularies.xml file.
    • If there are vocabularies that exist in the Vocabularies’ directory but not in the vocabularies.xml, the tool parses these vocabularies for their name and identifier and inserts new entries into the vocabularies.xml.
    • If the vocabularies in the Vocabularies’ directory are not placed in separate folders as described in the specification, the tool generates new folders for each vocabulary and copies the vocabularies into these.

  • Vocabulary Manager provides three different dialogs for inserting vocabularies from the local hard disk, the Vocabulary Bank for Education and from web pages.
    • Inserting vocabularies from the hard disk is done by copying the selected vocabularies into the temporary profile folder. Additional information about the vocabulary (e.g. its name, ID, type, URL etc.) can be stated in appropriate textboxes. It will be inserted into the vocabularies.xml on saving the profile.
    • Downloading vocabularies from the Vocabulary Bank for Education is realized by generating a link out of the vocabulary authority, the vocabulary identifier and an optional vocabulary revision number. The file that is found under the link can be downloaded and saved to the temporary profiles’ folder. If it is not a VDEX file, it will be deleted.
    • Downloading vocabularies from web pages works in a similar manner to downloading vocabularies from the Vocabulary Bank for Education. The only difference is that the link will not be generated automatically but has to be stated manually.

  • The last step consists of two smaller steps.
    • Firstly the information about all vocabularies is saved to a new vocabularies.xml file.
    • Then the whole profile is zipped and described with the name of the old file plus the suffix “_vocabularies.zip”.

Figure 1: The Application Profile Registry

Figure 3: Loading a profile into Vocabulary Manager

Other significant outcomes resulting from work package 3 include conformance testing tools, an IMS Common Cartridge and SCORM demonstrator, and best practices for content use.  A complete description of these recommendations and tools can be found in deliverables D3.1 Best Practice Report for Content Use, D3.2.1 Conformance Testing Tools version 1, D3.2.2 Conformance Testing Tools version 2, D3.3 IMS CC & SCORM Demonstrator v1.0, D3.4 Intermediate Evaluation Report for Content Use, D3.5 Best practice report for content use v2.0 and D3.6 IMS Common Cartridge & SCORM Demonstrator v2.0.