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The LRE Service Centre supported by ASPECT


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The ASPECT project produces recommendations and best practices for an efficient use of the standards and specifications and provides tools, services and documentation to support these practices. These are gathered together in the LRE Service Center.

The LRE Service Center includes the following tools:

Learning Technology Standards Observatory LTSO

  • URL: http://www.cen-ltso.net
  • End users:  Anyone interested in Learning Technology Standards and Specifications
  • Description: The Learning Technology Standards Observatory (LTSO) is a focal access point to updated information on projects, results, news, organisations, activities and events that are relevant to the development and adoption of e-learning technology standards and specifications. It offers a newsletter service, access to relevant experts and up-to-date information in this field.

Application Profile Registry

  • URL: http://apr.vocman.com
  • End Users: Systems needing information about application profiles.  Owners of application profiles and specialists developing new application profiles
  • Description: The ASPECT Application Profile Registry (APR) provides a browsable interface which allows specialists to find information about the data elements and vocabularies used by different application profiles and to view mappings between different profiles of the same base standard. The interface allows authorised users to add details of new application profiles.  The machine interface (REST API) provides this information in XML and JSON formats to consuming systems.

Vocabulary Bank for Education VBE

  • URL: http://aspect.vocman.com/vbe/
  • End users: Taggers, taxonomists, developers and curriculum designers.
  • Description: The ASPECT Vocabulary Bank for Education (VBE) provides a browsable and searchable web application to locate, view and download sets of terms, plus a machine interface (REST API). The vocabularies can be used for metadata, in particular for the Learning Resource Exchange.

LRE Learning Object Repository Registry (LORRy)

  • URL: http://lreregistry.eun.org:5984/registry/_design/registry/index.html
  • End users: Content providers, repository owners, learning object federation administrators
  • Description: The LRE LORRy is a catalog that provides up-to-date information on repositories of learning resources. It facilitates the access to the content of these repositories by describing: Collections of learning content (e.g., languages, formats, topics covered); collections of metadata used to describe this content (e.g., metadata schemas, metadata languages) and protocols used to get access to these collections (e.g., OAI-PMH, SQI, SPI, SRU/SRW)

ARIADNE Collection Registry

  • URL: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/ariadne-registry/  
  • End users: System administrators of content providers, developers of registry client tools
  • Description: The Collection Registry enables the interconnection of learning object repositories, in order to further increase their impact in making relevant content available to teachers, trainers and (life-long) learners, by specifying the locations of those repositories and the description of the protocols they support for exposing their learning resources to the consumers of the registry.
  • Further info: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/lomi/index.php/Ariadne_registry

ARIADNE Validation Service

  • URL: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/validationService/
  • End users: System Administrators & developers of Content providers
  • Description: The validation service is available for providing validation of metadata instances against predefined application profiles, for example based on IEEE LOM such as the LREv4.5 AP. To ensure that only compliant metadata are stored in a LOR, we use the validation service to check both the syntactic and semantic validity of the instances against the used profiles. The validation service has a modular approach, and combines different sorts of validation techniques, etc.
  • Further info: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/aspect-wiki/index.php/Harvesting_metadata#Metadata_Validation

Transformer Service, transforming metadata and vocabularies into another format

  • URL: http://lrecoreprod.eun.org:6080/mtdTransformer/
  • Source code: https://lretools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lretools/trunk/transformation-service
  • End users: Metadata creators, Metadata developers
  • Description: The purpose of the Metadata transformation service is to allow users transform metadata from one format (one application profile) such as LOM Strict to another format (another application profile) such as LREv4.0 application profile [1]. The service does not only support structural transformation using Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformation or Java-based transformation but also support for the vocabulary crosswalks from the vocabulary bank. From a software standpoint, it is based on a plugin architecture where new transformations can be added as plugins, provided as jar files, with no needs for modifying the transformer core. The transformation service is available online at http://lrecoreprod.eun.org:6080/mtdTransformer/. However, this version only permits users to transform one metadata instance at a time, which is convenient for demonstration or to see how the transformation service works. In case the user wants to transform a large number of metadata instances, it is recommended that the user checks out the transformation library at source forge and develops an upper “layout” which connects to his/her repository.

Automatic Translation Service for Learning Object Metadata

  • URL: http://lreforschools.eun.org, http://lrecoreprod.eun.org:6080/oaitarget/OAIHandler?verb=Identify
  • End users: Metadata editors, LRE end users
  • Description: Automatic Translation Service, which is integrated in the Learning Resource Exchange (LRE), enables better discovery rate of resources. All the metadata collected by the LRE are machine translated from English into German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese using SYSTRAN. Due to license costs, these services are currently limited to the LRE Associate Partners and ASPECT Associate Partners. Partners' metadata collections that contribute to the LRE are enriched with translations and identifiers and can be harvested back using the LRE OAI-PMH target (http://lrecoreprod.eun.org:6080/oaitarget/OAIHandler?verb=Identify).

Recommendations, Best Practices and known interoperability issues

  • URL: http://www.aspect-project.org/node/174
  • End users: content providers and repository owners, tools’ providers, federation and discovery service builders, and standards’ organizations.
  • Description: The recommendations reflect the experience of partners in the ASPECT Best Practice Network and are grouped by the different categories of stakeholders involved in the project.

 

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