Primary Multimedia Objects and 'Educational Metadata'

Large multimedia database systems have great potential for educational use Their assets can often be used to support educational and research activities in a wide variety of educational contexts, supporting learners and educators from many subject areas This article focuses on what appears to be a fundamental dilemma for the developers of such systems regarding how to tag or index their assets with metadata so as to support discovery of the assets by these educational users On the one hand, developers are unlikely to want (or be able) to restrictively specify who their users should be and, in particular, how they should use individual assets in their particular educational contexts Thus they would not want to tag assets with metadata related to how the object should be used On the other hand, they must make decisions about what metadata terms to choose to describe their assets To do this, they must make a very limited choice, from the many thousands of potential terms available from different subject disciplines and different levels Thus developers are seemingly forced to make choices about who their target users are and how they will want to use the resources In other words developers may have to do exactly what they do not want to do This article explores in detail the causes of this dilemma and introduces three complementary approaches to resolving the situation