Metadata: we hardly knew you...

Just when I think metadata and other Semantic web technologies are a failed technology path, I see something interesting (perhaps even promising). The Communications of the ACM this month has an article on the iLumina project ("digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching materials for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science") that uses both RDF (the Dublin core, which I have used for about 4 years on my main web site) and LOM (Learning Object Metadata).

This article also had a link to the Open Archives Initiative, which is also worth looking at. They have a project for an Apache module for publishing metadata (so far, no official software releases).

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