Curriculum Online Tagging Tool
The Tagging Tool was designed to enable users with limited technical experience and no experience of XML or RDF to rapidly produce and upload metadata to the Curriculum Online portal. It is the primary resource, and the only official application, for populating the £300 million+ project with metadata descriptions.
The Tagging Tool generates complex XML documents from the information the user enters into a series of simple forms. It enables novice users to become immediately productive, tagging resources with considerably more ease, efficiency and accuracy than afforded by the manual creation of such documents.
Box UK developed the first version of the Tagging Tool in 2001. This version enabled the user to tag resources against the Dublin Core, National Curriculum and Virtual Teacher Centre metadata sets. The Tool was not limited to these metadata sets, however, and could readily incorporate new schema with no changes to its source code, in a similar manner to the EdNA Metadata Tool.
During 2002, the COL metadata set superseded the combination of the Dublin Core, National Curriculum and Virtual Teacher Centre metadata sets. In addition, in order to comply with international standards, it was decided that XML should replace RDF as the preferred mechanism for representing metadata. Whilst the Tagging Tool was schema-independent, this change to XML meant that metadata produced using the Tagging Tool was not in a format that could be understood by the portal.
A short-term solution to this issue was rapidly implemented by Box UK: the Tool was upgraded to work with the new COL schema and was integrated with an XSLT processor. XSLT style sheets were then used by the Tool to transform its native RDF into the required XML format upon saving files.
However, there were several disadvantages to this approach that prevented it from being a long-term solution. Firstly, the XSLT transformation was not a two-way process: XML files saved using the Tagging Tool could not be opened by it. In addition, much of the Tool's RDF and RDF-schema functionality was now completely redundant. Finally, for the foreseeable future, the Tool would be producing only COL metadata, making the schema-independent functionality redundant.
As a result it was decided that a new, COL-specific, version of the Tagging Tool should be created with these constraints in mind. Version 2 of the Tagging Tool could take advantage of the fact that it would not be required to work with any other schema and could present a user-interface tailored purely to the COL standard.
Version 2 of the Tagging Tool was built upon lessons learned during the lifetime of version 0.96. User-feedback and investigations into the usability of the original version led to an improved interface and a more intuitive working environment, whilst the absence of unnecessary RDF and schema-parsing code resulted in a more streamlined and robust application.
The new version of the Tagging Tool brings several useful features, including the ability to read and convert RDF files produced by the original Tool, integrated metadata validation, and the ability to upload multiple files to the portal using FTP.
References:
Tagging Tool http://metadata.ngfl.gov.uk/taggingtool/
IMS LOM http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/index.cfm
Curriculum Online http://www.curriculumonline.gov.uk
EdNA Metadata Tool http://www.citraccesspoint.com.au/edna/install.htm
