Everybody uses metadata. Everybody gets into daily situations, where good metadata matter. Maybe you
aren’t familiar with the concept of metadata, but it’s everywhere around you. For example, when you are
looking for free licensed photos, green winter boots or the best price for your next trip. To filter and find
this information, you need metadata.
Briefly, metadata describe data. In the educational field, wide and interoperable metadata of high quality
are essential to find educational resources, learning opportunities etc. in a wide variety of systems and
improve the data exchange between educational stakeholders.
We as edu-sharing.NET e.V. provide innovation and community management and promote the
conception and implementation of networked IT solutions around educational content. With over 20
years of experience in digital content management for educational institutions and federal states, we
published WirLernenOnline.de, a search engine for free educational content, at the beginning of the
pandemic. With this search engine, teachers as well as learners can find quality-assured and free
materials for their everyday work with just a few clicks from meanwhile almost 200,000 indexed contents.
In this context, we support the (further) development of comprehensive and user-oriented metadata,
evaluate standards and link different metadata sets in the education sector.
In our current project ITs.JOINTLY we continue to research how AI will be trained to support interlinked
communities in order to automatically index large amounts of content and provide it with suitable
metadata.
After this talk you will know more about metadata standards and why we need them in the educational
context. You will know about the challenge to get good metadata and how AI/Machine can be used to
improve and generate metadata.