As a part of the Curriculum and Training Group, we have a work group exploring possible solutions for mapping Drupal production roles / job functions to competencies and to learning content. The objective may ultimately be to build a new module that will allow for the easy collection of topics and sub-topics across all curriculum and learning content, as well as a mechanism for managing and distributing such records. (Curriculum and Training Group: http://groups.drupal.org/curriculum-and-training)
I was lucky enough to attend the Open Media Camp in April of '09 and hear representatives form the Public Television Standards Group and WGBH Television discuss meta data standards with leaders of the Open Media Project. While I have not been able to follow the progress of the Open Media Project closely, it seems to me that what Open Media has been working on with regard to cataloging genre for the generation of automated program listings etc, is closely related to what the Open Learning Initiative needs to to with mapping curriculum and taxonomy terms.
I am wondering if someone might be able to provide an update on the vision and status of Open Media efforts to manage metadata and controlled vocabularies? If the Open Media Project currently collecting and managing these terms in Drupal, might someone be willing to provide us with an overview?
If others see the potential overlap here and would be willing to help us explore possible solutions from data structure, to collection, management, and distribution, we would love to hear from you.
While today may be an exception, our workgroup (part of the Curriculum and Training Group) generally has weekly discussions in the #drupal-dojo IRC room on Mondays at 7pm UTC, 3pm ET and noon PT.
Thank you!
Curriculum and Training Group: http://groups.drupal.org/curriculum-and-training
Open Drupal Curriculum: http://drupalkata.com/curriculum/node/707
Proposed specifications: http://groups.drupal.org/node/81754
Comments
Current OMP status
The OMP changes as it develops, and has currently moved away from using Drupal taxonomies to using SQL tables for shared classification.
There was some IRC discussion about this matter last week, so things may change, but this post explains a little more about the current setup: http://groups.drupal.org/node/83804
Splendid
Currently pbcore
Currently pbcore http://drupal.org/project/pbcore provides a set of specific terms which can be used to populate a cck textfield. I do a lot of work for the Open Media Project and have just started working with the module. My belief is the module needs to utilize the taxonomy framework.
The reason pbcore currently is not a taxonomy is because out of the box taxonomy had no way of preventing new terms from being added nor a way of disabling terms (easily done via hook_form_alter and using the http://drupal.org/project/term_permissions module). The other issue was no one could agree on a core set of terms. So pbcore was created to map local terms to the pbcore terms. This can be implemented using taxonomy synonyms.