[seul-edu] Re: [seul-edu] Pangée, LingoTeach, QVocab and data interchange

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2000 at 06:43:37PM -0500, Doug Loss wrote:

> On Tue, 01 Feb 2000, Thomas Temp? wrote:
> 
>> Obviously, EduML is about handling students records and such, not
>> content. And even then, would a single DTD be sufficient to easily manage
>> data both for Qvocab and LingoTeach, let alone the rest?

> Bruno or Odile, could you enlighten us here?  I thought that there were
> tags in EduML for content.  Am I mistaken, or did Thomas miss them?  It's
> possible that we're both right and have different interpretations of
> "content," of course.

You are both right (this is the post modern era after all ;-)
One intent of EduML is to standardize the results of various educational
endeavors so as to provide a big picture on how a student is doing, and this
does include "student records and such".  

EduML is ours; we have it include content if we want to; from quiz items in 
math to the catalogs of school library collections. Content is encyclopedic.  
Any XML can include another XML; so for example, MathML can be embedded in
the math quiz XML files, ChemML in chemistry quiz files and so on.  I am not
sure what XML is appropriate for language learning, but for characters of
any language, I imagine unicode (which is part of all XML) will be necessary.

> > What we need, in order to go beyond the one-to-one import filters, is a
> data formalization that embraces all of the projects around. This would
> allow to build a single DTD, say EduResML, for educational resources. And
> we won't get any further than pathching filters upon existing programs
> until we've built that EduResML. Or am I mistaken?

I agree if what you mean is:  We can start by using XML to do data transfers
only (import/export) but we really want to aim (for the long term) at
storing and using native XML in our programs... and it would help that as a
civilisation we agreed (de facto) to a standard educational XML.  

> This seems to me like an overwhelming problem.  I think you'll need
> multiple XML DTDs, each for a subset of educational content.  Trying to
> design a DTD to cover grammar, botany, art, and algebra would be very
> difficult, I think.

Yes, it feels like building an encyclopedia in a way, similar to: Define
education and give three examples.  Furthermore, in the field of education, 
we love to change our paradigms every few years, and might even want to 
change our DTD to reflect those changes.

> > Such a project could lead to a much wider-scope DTD, which would allow
> for an all-in-one interchange format, and in the same time trace the way to
> _the_ ultimate language-learning project.

> I think it would be better to have the multiple DTDs I mentioned and
> combine data from each as necessary.  Think of each DTD as a DBMS table
> definition, with "reference" tags that can be used to refer to other DTDs
> as needed.  That isn't very clear, I'm sure.  Sorry.

Yes, this is like the unix philosophy of piping simple programs together to
make a complex useful application.  EduML was intended to be the "shell" so
to speak.

Bruno