Revisiting mediaType

[Dave Gladney]

Hi all,

You may or may not recall a discussion that began back in August 2012 around a property called "mediaType." mediaType was originally listed on the LRMI spec page as a property important within the context of education, but "already adequately expressed in Schema.org." [1] In working with the Agilix team on the development of the inBloom Tagger app, it was discovered that in fact there is no property for indicating media type within Schema.org. 

As everyone here recognizes, mediaType is certainly important in the education space. In fact AEP found that 45% of educators and 55% of educational publishers said media type was important to search and discovery [2]. But obviously this property has application outside of education and as such, Greg Grossmeier brought this issue to the attention of the W3C public mailing list at the time [3]. However, the discussion quickly took a dive down the rabbit hole of content vs. carrier (thing vs. the way it is stored/delivered) and remains unresolved [4]. 

Since this was originally listed as an existing property and is viewed by most educational publishers as a vital piece of metadata, AEP opted to continue to collect media type data in our proof-of-concept tagging work, and the inBloom Tagger includes this property in its output schema. However, there remains a need for a media type property (even if it's called something else) to be formally presented to the W3C folks and codified as part of Schema.org.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have the metadata background or expertise to lead this conversation, and since Greg has moved on to bigger and better things, I'm appealing to the group here to bring this back to the attention of the W3C folks and rekindle the discussion. 

Any takers? :)

-Dave

[1] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Properties/1.0

[2] http://www.lrmi.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/LRMI-Survey-Report-2012-PROOF

[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Aug/0047.html

[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012Sep/0092.html

- - - - -
Dave Gladney
LRMI Project Manager
The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP)
302-295-8348
www.lrmi.net
www.AEPweb.org

[Paul Libbrecht]

Dave,

How about SoftwareApplication's fileFormat property?

(grrrr, I wish I could reference this precisely, just this I can: http://schema.org/SoftwareApplication)

Actually, most of the other properties of SoftwareApplication seem appropriate for an electronic learning resource.

(downloadUrl, fileSize, requirements, screenshot, softwareVersion).

Paul

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[Steve Midgley]

+1 for fileFormat in SoftwareApplication. Kind of sucky that's it's relegated inside SoftwareApplication, but it's a way of describing mime type which is all we need I think.

Can LRMI multiply inherit properties in schema.org? That is, can we consume a property from SoftwareApplication even if we aren't downstream of it in the hierarchy?

Steve

[Dave Gladney]

Thanks for the fast response. 

fileFormat works for electronic learning resources and in fact there's also "encoding" under CreativeWork that I'm guessing could potentially work too, perhaps avoiding the hierarchy problem. 

The problem is we are encouraging use of LRMI for learning resources in all media. When there is only a print representation of a textbook, we tell publishers to markup the product page in their online catalog (or to create one if one doesn't exist). So how do we indicate with Schema.org/LRMI that a web page is describing a physical object like a print textbook? 

- - - - -
Dave Gladney
LRMI Project Manager
The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP)
302-295-8348
www.lrmi.net
www.AEPweb.org

[Joshua Marks]

Steve,

 

LRMI is a component of Schema.org. One of the starting directives for the working group was to define just those elements and attributes that are specific to learning resources and which are not sufficiently addressed in other parts of Scheme (I believe you were there when we discuss that in the first meeting). How Schema avoids redundancy is not clear to me.

 

Now with regard to fileFormat, that is, from a users perspective, not the same as Media Type. A video is a type of media but might be one of an endless list of a video file formats. As a result I think we need both filFormat and mediaType. However this is not an education or learning resource specific term so we should also Schema for guidance on this. With Greg on to other things, I m not sure who out Schema interface is.

 

Separately we have the learnignResrouceType which implies or can imply media but should not do so directly. (e.g. a Lecture can be a video but it might be an event,  book, transcript or a presentation file as well).  

 

Within Schema there is also CreativeWork -> Book, MediaObject (http://schema.org/MediaObject) , Photograph, Movie. MusicRecording, and a few others that might be relevant. I would think MediaObject would need to be expanded to be more useful.

 

This is certainly not well defined nor organized in Schema.

 

Joshua Marks

CTO

Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community

jma...@curriki.org

www.curriki.org

[Paul Libbrecht]

On 13 mars 2013, at 17:07, Joshua Marks wrote:
> Now with regard to fileFormat, that is, from a users perspective, not the same as Media Type. A video is a type of media but might be one of an endless list of a video file formats. As a result I think we need both filFormat and mediaType.

Joshua, I agree this is the case for users but I disagree microdata is for users.
Do we want to define a new vocabulary of "learning resources relevant file-format names"? I don't think so. Media-types are clearly not the panacea (apparently web-intents and uniform type identifiers would provide a better foundation) but they are widespread.

> However this is not an education or learning resource specific term so we should also Schema for guidance on this. With Greg on to other things, I m not sure who out Schema interface is.

Dan Brickely might help?
We could ask Guha?

> Within Schema there is also CreativeWork -> Book, MediaObject (http://schema.org/MediaObject) , Photograph, Movie. MusicRecording, and a few others that might be relevant. I would think MediaObject would need to be expanded to be more useful.

Funnily I felt SoftwareApplication was better suited with its spectrum of properties. These include file-length, screenshots, and download-url, for example, as well as platform or application requirements. The only bug of SoftwareApplication is its name. It should be SoftwareArtifact or SoftwareDocument.

One of the reasons mediaType is not cleanly supported everywhere is the redirection nature of OER-repositories web-pages where microdata appears: one would expect the media-type to be "already included" in the content-negotiation phase, so that stating once again a media-type would not appear useful. Having a property such as download-url makes it much more clear, to my eyes.

Paul

[Phil Barker]

Hello all.
I think one problem is that "mediaType" is under-defined, it will mean different things to different people. The original LRMI spec page says that it is covered by the genre property of creativeWork, which may indeed work for some meanings of mediaType.

Another meaning is the more general resource type (video or audio or image etc) regardless of file format. The schema itemType hierarchy handles that:
videos are http://schema.org/VideoObject
audio recordings are http://schema.org/AudioObject
images are http://schema.org/ImageObject
there's no TextObject type which would be the equivalent but there are types for articles, books, blog posts, maps etc (I think this slips into another slightly different meaning of media type but for example http://schema.org/Book has bookFormat which may be eBook )

Then within each mediaType there is an encoding format (inherited from the MediaObject class)

The LRMI properties are defined at CreativeWork level and so are inherited by all of these. To address Steve's question directly LRMI: doesn't need to inherit from SoftwareApplication, it works the other way round.

So if you have an instructional video on Physics in mpeg4 describe it as

item
  itemType=MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "schema.org" claiming to be "http://schema.org/VideoObject"
  name = "My Physics video"
  about = "Physics"
  encodingFormat = "mpeg4"
  educationalAligment = ...


if you have a software application use

item
  itemType = "http://schema.org/SoftwareApplication"
  name = "My Physics simulation"
  about = "Physics"
  fileFormat = "application/zip"
  educationalAligment = ...

I think the encoding property of CreativeWork and the reverse encodesCreativeWork property of MediaObject are not for specifying something like the mediaType of the creative because what it allows you to do is to point from a creativeWork to a mediaObject such as the two items described above. I think it is intended for establishing relationships such as exist between scripts and films, or songs and recordings of them,  or between recordings in different formats of the same song/film. It may be useful where you want to describe a lecture, a video of the lecture and an audio recording of the lecture -- but there are rabbit holes in that direction.

Phil

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[Jim Goodell]

MediaObject in Schema.org has encodingFormat (mp3, mpeg4, etc.), and playerType (e.g. Flash)

The content vs. carrier and level of granularity are still issues...also ongoing discussions for CEDS. For mediaType it is important for a librarian to know that the video is only available on a VHS video tape or DVD and that the appropriate hardware will be needed, but for how much longer will that be the case?   How long should 'VHS Video' be an option?  It is more important (and keeps it simple for searching) to know the general type, i.e.  "Video" vs. "Audio" as the media type...For LRMI let the Schema.org MediaObject fill in the details whether it be physical or digital media, e.g. encodingFormat: flv  playerType: Flash  OR encodingFormat: NTSC  playerType: VHS

learningResourceType adds to the confusion as the pilot used options such as "Audio," which is a mediaType as well as a resource type.  

Granularity is also an issue, e.g. do we want to know that the resource is a "handout" vs. and "audio" clip used in a lesson or do we just want to know that it is a learning resource designed to support "lesson".  WHen options used have different levels of granularity it creates confusion for both taggers and consumers. A community of SEAs have agreed to use a limited set of the Learning Resource Type options from CEDS when tagging learning resources in shared resource repositories. They are: 

• Course
  
• Unit
  
• Lesson
  
• Lesson Activity
  
• Assessment
  
• AssessmentItem
  
• AssessmentAsset 
  

 -jim