Meeting Information
Date: | May 22, 2013 |
Time: | 11 EDT/16 CEST |
Attending: Panos Bamidis, Emily Cahill, Daniela Giordano, Sarah Hunt, Dimitris Spachos, Valerie Smothers, Rhonda Willis.
Agenda Items
1 Introductions
Daniela introduced herself. She is an associate professor at University of Catania, on the engineering faculty, and she is interested in computers and educational technology. She has been participating in the mEducator project for the last 3 years. She sees an opportunity to work on content sharing using semantic technologies.
Panos Bamidis is an associate professor of medical education and informatics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece and coordinator of the mEducator project. He works with Daniela and Stathis.
Rhonda is with the Centers for Disease Control and prevention in Altanta. She is an Instructional designer and works with their educational design and accreditation branch. She is also the CDC Train administrator; TRAIN is their external LMS. They use it to get training out to the public health community.
Emily works with the MedEdPORTAL program, a service from AAMC. They offer peer reviewed educational modules and push out innovations with regards to educational tools. They also host a directory of online accredited ce activities from member institutions. They are looking to broaden and include CDC among others.
Sarah Hunt also works with MedEdPORTAL and primarily works on publications.
Dimitris is the main developer of mEducator.
2 MedBiquitous and ANSI process update
Valerie explained that ANSI requires MedBiquitous to reaffirm, revise, or withdraw its standards after a maximum of five years. Five years has passed since Healthcare LOM was approved, and we have submitted the forms necessary to begin work on version 2.0. The mEducator project, MedEdPORTAL, other standards that have emerged in the past five years, and input from other implementers will all inform the development of version 2.0.
3 Discuss proposed modifications to lom for version 2.0
Valerie explained that this document is a result of discussions with Daniela around how healthcare LOM and mEducator’s metadata schema could be better aligned.
Specialty
The group discussed changing the Specialty element in healthcare LOM (identifying the specialty serving as the target audience for the learning resource or activity) to DisciplineOrSpecialty. Daniela explained that they wanted to include access to resources that may be collateral, for example, informatics. Specialty or Discipline is a nice way to target certain areas.
Emily commented that they have a field called professional interest. It can be cross cutting across health professions. They have health literacy, technology, etc. A resource could cover these categories in medical, dental, etc. Specialty and discipline is specific to medical specialties.
The group agreed to change specialty to DisciplineOrSpecialty.
Profession
Emily explained that in their system, the end user can search for things only dental related. Profession is indicated under intended audience, and that is working well. The MedBiquitous list is more extensive. They would like to filter a little bit more.
Valerie asked Rhonda how CDC is categorizing profession.
Rhonda commented it depends on the system. In TRAIN, there is a good breakdown of professions. That tends to change a lot; additions are made based on state needs. There was a new addition this week. Otherwise, they use a broad public health category. She will pull the list of categories off TRAIN.
Identifiers
The group discussed using URIs for identifiers in healthcare LOM. That would mean that implementers would need o make data accessible at the proposed URI. The proposal to generate a metadata URI was set to account for semantic web technologies and a linked data approach. Panos explained that major digital libraries are considering this approach of exposing metadata as linked data on the web. It improves retrieval and access possibilities. It is an important requirement to expose metadata within a linked data approach and ensure every object has a URI. They took care of that requirement and generated URI’s automatically in their system. It’s resolvable on the web. A machine can access that information.
Emily asked if there was any connection to Digital Object Identifiers.
Panos commented that is related to the semantic web idea. URI’s are used as labels of names. In order to get the meanings of URI’s, that is different at a semantic web level. One would have useful information in an RDF framework.
Valerie commented that DOIs do have an associated URI (ie http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.5914) .
Daniela agreed it is the same concept: having an identifier that is persistent and unique. You can have a URI without DOI. The concept is similar.
Emily commented that they plan to use DOIs in the near future.
Valerie commented you could provide both the URI and the DOI.
Emily asked if something exists on the web, is there an inherent uri? Or is there an association or registration process.
Valerie commented that a URI does not need to be registered the way a DOI is registered.
Daniela commented that you may know the title of a famous article. The URI could change.For semantic web technologies to work, the best practice is don’t change the web address. That needs to be stable.
Valerie asked if this should be required by the specification or should be recommended as a best practice.
Panos commented it is essential to move to graph based representation. Sooner or later it will be needed.
Valerie commented that as a follow up working group members could investigate the feasibility of implementing URI as a requirement. She will ask working group members to do just that.
Credit related elements
The group discussed updates to continuing education credit related elements. Valerie commented that much has changed since they approved the standard 5 years ago. The US Department of Veterans Affairs holds many more accreditations than currently listed in the specification’s recommended lists. Valerie added that this is very US centric right now, but most other countries don’t have quite the same semi-regulatory environment in continuing health professions education. Daniela offered to take a look at European CE accreditation efforts.
Panos commented that if they get a new grant, it will be best to go directly to application of the standards to educational resources. We will need to further extend. They can push through this project Stathis is working on. It involves bilateral collaboration on medical informatics education. That could be one way to push through. It would make people aware at the European level.
The group agreed to revise credit related elements to reflect changes in CE accreditation and update taking into account VA needs.
License
Valerie went on to discuss proposed additions to healthcare lom. The current structure allows you to say whether o not a license exists and provide a description. A link may be included in the description, but it is not specifically called out. Valerie asked Emily how they do licensing. She replied that they have a creative commons license on each abstract page. The image is actually a link that opens the license. The group agreed to add an element specifically for the license URI.
Repurposing elements
Daniela commented that the idea is that you have some educational resource that could be reused in other contexts, provided some adjustments are made. You may use a different measurement system (Eng vs Ital), or adjust a virtual patient to reflect cultural issues, or want to translate. That leads to another instance of educational object tailored to a different context. mEducator following experience in eViP, made explicit the fact that one resource was generated from another. You can see that the repurposed version exists in another language. information is embedded in the metadata, linking a chain of resources through repurposing history. That provides access to wider set of resources. You include the URI of parent resource. Also put additional information that can be useful. Repurposing context has a vocabulary of options. For example, translation, educational level, mobile, etc. One optional field is repurposing description, where an author can say more about why they have repurposed, what is the value, etc.
The group agreed to add the repurposing elements.
Citation
Emily commented that MedEdPORTAL already provides a citation for its peer reviewed resources. The group agreed to add citation.
Quality
Panos commented that this is not used much in meducator. A website could have quality stamp, like HON. It could also have a peer review process. In one system review happens before publication. It could be part of the process; one could attest to the quality in some way.
Dimitris commented that some communication between reviewer and student may be necessary.
Emily commented that they have just 2 logos. MedEdPORTAL peer reviewed or MedEdPORTAL non-peer reviewed. That is how they distinguish.
The group agreed to continue the discussion on next call.
Valerie commented that LRMI, the Learning resource metadata Initiative, has been accepted into schema.org (see http://www.lrmi.net/dev/lrmi-accepted-into-schema-org). LRMI provides a way to embed metadata into the text of a web page so that the metadata may be used by search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
4 Open discussion
Decisions
- Change Specialty to DisciplineOrSpecialty.
- Use source and id attributes to support referencing standardized vocabularies and update the recommended vocabulary of professions.
- Revise credit related elements to reflect changes in CE accreditation and update taking into account VA needs.
- Add element for link to license.
- Add repurposing elements.
- Add citation element.
Action Items
- Working group members will investigate the feasibility of implementing URIs as identifiers. The metadata record should be available/exposed at the URI cited. Valerie will send a note to the working group asking them to investigate.
- Valerie will implement the working group’s decisions.