A posting from Mikael Nilsson and Dan Brickley reports on design activity now underway toward the creation of an IMS-RDF binding specification. Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden) and Universität Hannover (Germany) have begun work on an RDF binding for IMS metadata, and early attempts at an RDF Schema for this are available online. The IMS Metadata Specification is part of a suite of open specifications for "facilitating online distributed learning activities such as locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance, and exchanging student records between administrative systems." The XML bindings with supporting XML DTDs have been available for some time, and have been implemented. Draft resources for the proposed RDF binding are available from the Swedish [KTH] Competence Centre for User-Oriented IT Design, including (1) Document on issues with the IMS 1.1 information model and XML binding. (2) Document on issues with the IMS 1.2 draft XML DTD and XML Schema definition. (3) A suggestion for an IMS metadata 1.2 RDF binding, with draft RDF schema (4) A Java interface for IMS metadata editing. The design team encourages participation from all interested parties.

From the IMS web site: "IMS is a global consortium with members from educational, commercial, and government organizations. Funding comes from membership fees, with organizations choosing to join as either Contributing or Developers Network members. IMS endeavors to promote the widespread adoption of specifications that will allow distributed learning environments and content from multiple authors to work together... There has been an IMS DTD for meta-data available for some time at the IMS site. At the last Technical Board meeting it was decided that the DTD would be converted to lower-cased element names to bring it into alignment with general W3C practice. You can use an HTML editor such as the CodeSweeper in Homesite to down-case existing records if need be. DTDs, XML Schemas, XML-RDF and XDRs are 'control documents' that are used to make and validate XML instances. Microsoft has created an XDR control document for the meta-data. This was created to support the XDR that Microsoft created to support the Content Packaging XML binding. This is useful because right now the only non-DTD form support in normal applications is XDR, which is supported in Internet Explore 5. Microsoft has committed to supporting W3C's XML Schema when it is released. On the subject of XML Schemas (the W3C effort), we have been tracking that pretty closely, and have a trial XML Schema we are working with. We won't release one until the W3C standard looks stable. It's still a working document, but has been submitted for vote. IMS will embrace XML-Schema because of the power it provides, particularly with respect to future growth and validation."