This British Standard gives recommendations for achieving interoperability between systems in learning, education and training.
The standard provides guidance:
a) on the development and reuse of application profiles;
b) for the use of application profiles where interoperability is a requirement.
Where application profiles are developed solely for local use, then this standard as a whole is not applicable although individual recommendations could still prove useful.
The standard is applicable across all sectors and levels of learning, education and training. Whilst the requirements of different communities can lead to the development of different application profiles, the processes underlying the development will be common.
The standard provides guidance on the reuse of the BS ISO 15836 Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) developed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [1] and the IEEE 1484.12.1-2002 standard for Learning Object Metadata (LOM) developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Learning Object Metadata Working Group [2].
The standard makes recommendations about encoding mechanisms (e.g. XML DTD, XML schema, RDF) for application profile bindings but does not mandate the use of any particular encoding mechanism.
The standard does not provide mechanisms for evaluating or comparing the educational value of learning resources.
The standard is intended to optimize, rather than completely remove, human interaction in the transfer of information between systems.