metadata standards

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'm thinking of doing a simple module that would take a Drupal Book and output a SCORM package (.zip) with the necessary components.

My questions are:
* would there be interest for such a module?
* what SCORM standard (pick one) would be the "best" (least worst?) one to use? (Pointers are welcome, I'm kind of a newb regarding all the available standards).
* do you have any features you'd like this to have?

We've been using the Taxonomy XML to import the hierarchical taxonomy we've been using for genres in Project, Show, and Timeslot Theme. Taxonomy XML now supports taxonomy as a service.

Summary

The following is a proposal from Open Media Camp participants for a process to develop video metadata standards, particularly for video genre types. The proposal is to involve the Open Web Foundation to establish such a process.

The Open Media Project

The Open Media Project was initiated by Denver Open Media in 2008, and is now a collaborative effort with Amherst Community Television, Boston Neighborhood Network, channelAustin, Davis Media Access, Portland Community Media, and Urbana Public Television. The project's mission is to develop and distribute an open source tool set that will enable public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations to work together as user-driven, locally-focused, alternative media networks. Based in Drupal, the project is developing a modular, web-based system that makes local user-generated media more accessible locally and nationally through digital distribution. Leveraging thousands of open-source contributors, the tools are relatively easy and affordable to implement.

Open Media Camp

The Open Media Camp held in Denver, Colorado on April 18 and 19, 2009, brought together Drupal media module developers and implementers, including representatives from all but one of the Open Media Project partner sites. The Drupal developers who attended maintain some of the key media modules. The two-day camp at Denver Open Media's facilities was organized in an "unconference" format. There were sessions focused on metadata standards, video modules, CCK and Views modules, and media management, as well as on topics specifically related to the Open Media Project such as theming and MERCI, the reservation module.

Existing Video Metadata Practices

Public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations approach video metadata and media genre type standards in a variety of ways. Some centers operate with no standards at all and allow open or free tagging, where users choose their own tags or key word descriptors for their video programs. PegMedia, a media transfer site for PEG (Public, Education, Government) community television stations, with more than 400 stations and producers, only uses open tagging. They have no standards for genre or subject types. Rather than using a pre-defined taxonomy, this bottom-up method of open tagging generates what some call a folksonomy.