A presentation on Agricultural Learning Resources at the 9th AOS workshop at the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA conference

During the 9th Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) workshop, held on Aug. 26th 2008 during the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA Conference, Gauri Salokhe (FAO) presented the work that FAO, in strict collaboration with the Agricultural University of Athens, is conducting on the management of learning resources. After a first phase in which a survey was made of all the existing metadata sets describing learning resources, a Task Force was created to involve partners in activities and discussions that will hopefully bring to the adoption of a common approach in exchanging information on learning resources. The Agricultural Learning Resources Task Force (AgLR TF) started an e-Conference where essential issues like how learning repositories have been managed so far, what are the major requirements on the part of managers and users of learning repositories and whether a common metadata set should be selected or sharing could be achieved by mapping the different metadata sets used.

An interesting question was posed by Barbara Hutchinson on how to distinguish a learning resource from a regular document-like object and the answer was that it basically depends on the different contexts: whatever you consider as a learning resource can be described and indexed as a a learning resource and from that moment on it will be accessible as a learning resource.