Metadata Quality, Utility and the Semantic Web: The Case of Learning Resources and Achievement Standards

This article explores metadata quality issues in the creation and encoding of mappings or correlations of educational resources to K-12 achievement standards and the deployment of the metadata generated on the Semantic Web. The discussion is framed in terms of quality indicia derived from empirical studies of metadata in the Web environment. A number of forces at work in determining the quality of correlations metadata are examined including the nature of the emerging Semantic Web metadata ecosystem itself, the reliance on string values in metadata to identify achievement standards, the growing complexity of the standards environment, and the misalignment in terms of granularity between resource and declared objectives.