Development:Outcomes
This pages is an initial place to discuss options for storing and managing moodle metadata. These are just suggestions and are made by a person who does not know moodle internals.
There are several steps to managing a complex applications metadata:
- Document the key "Data Element Concpets" and their structure. This would include high-level concepts such as Course, Student, Teacher etc.
- Document data element properties associated with each concept. Properties should always be associated with a concept.
- Store this metadata in a metadata "registry", a centrally managed place to store metadata
- Create a system that allows users to modify and update metadata
There are several ways to approach this.
- There are metadata registry standards such as ISO/IEC 11179. This standard has a wide number of interpretations.
- There are other education metadata standards such as IMS global and the School Interoperability Framework (SIF)
- Once the metadata is stored in a consistant place and format, transforms can be made to extract portions of the metadata using reports or transforms
- A matadata registry can be the heart of a model-driven architecture
Most systems attempt to seperate the semantics from the representation of metadata.
- Semantics tell us the meaning of a data element but are free from version or constraints
- Represtations of the metadata tell us what table and column metadata appears in each version of Moodle and what the limitations are in a specification
Many metadata managment systems use a 3-part data element name:
ClassPropertyTerm
Were Class is the concept, property is a property of that concept and Term is a Representation term such as Count, Date, ID, Indicator, Text
For example:
CourseDescriptionText
Questions
Where can we get a list of key moodle conceptual data elements and their definitions?