Off Course-On Target

Sailing Into Uncharted Waters

There are a number of changes coming up for both myself and Off Course - On Target (OCOT), so this posting will be a bit different to provide you with a quick overview of what's coming your way.

Ship Shape

Through to the incredible support of my company, Autodesk Inc., and my boss (thanks Kelly!), I'm going to be off work through January 25th, 2008, and busy using up my large collection of years of accumulated vacation time. I'll be using this time to finish getting my sailboat, the good ship Learnativity, all ship shape and ready for some upcoming extended world cruising.  I'll start posting more details for you on my new adventures at sea in the new year and Elliott Masie and I are going to join forces in a larger context as he too sets out to live, learn, and explore this great planet of ours. We've dubbed our collective effort as the "Grand Learning Expedition" and will have a variety of ways for you to participate and learn along with us in the new year.

With all my time and attention devoted to this and all my online time spent learning more about all things nautical, including finding the best sources and prices for the seeming unending supply of equipment a seaworthy sailboat requires, my one regret is that I won't have any time to devote to Off Course - On Target until I return to work at the end of January. BUT, never fear, there are some very interesting alternatives and additions for you, and we'll continue to ensure that OCOT remains "serendipity central" and lives up to being the place "where unexpected paths lead to great discoveries."

New Perspectives, New IQ Points?

I've always been intrigued by and have often quoted Alan Kay's estimation that:

"A new perspective is worth 80 IQ points"

and this quote came to mind as I was pondering what to do with OCOT while I'm out. Of course, one perfectly fine option is to simply hang up a "Gone Sailing" sign and give you a rest and a chance to spend more time on the many other sites I'm sure you are trying to stay up with.

But I thought of some other options as well.  For example, I've long been interested in having more diversity of content within the blog format, and I think we need to understand more about the boundaries of that format before we switch to another one, such as a wiki or newsletters or shared documents or e-mail threads. I've also been planning doing some interviews, and featuring new perspectives from others to add to my own. Now I have the luxury of expanding upon this. In keeping with our theme of experiential learning being such a great teacher, I've picked out a small group of people I know who come from extremely varied backgrounds, professions, locations, and interests, and of course, perspectives. I've asked them to consider sharing their thoughts and ideas with you here on OCOT in text, audio, or video. I've left it completely open to each individual to decide everything from topics to format to frequency, and have simply asked that they choose topics they have a passion for and ones they think would be of interest to you. I'm excited by the prospect of having OCOT be a forum for the range of ideas and points of view this eclectic group will undoubtedly come up with, and am very confident you'll really enjoy it immensely.

I'm also interested to see how this works for the invited guests.  I've purposely picked a very broad range of individuals, and some have their own blogs, so this is in part an experiment to see if it makes sense for them to use OCOT as an additional outlet or to speak through their own blogs and use OCOT for connections I might make, providing comments, etc. Other invitees don't have a blog, but may be considering starting one, so this is a chance for them to experiment. For others  who don't have the time or desire to commit to a regular flow of content that a blog requires, this opportunity provides an outlet for them whenever they would like to use it. You can come up with many other options I'm sure, and again, this will be a chance to experiment and discover some of these combinations, and learn more about the variety of presentation that works within blogs and what needs to go beyond these boundaries.

We'll keep this wide open and informal, so just how many of them can find the time to contribute and just how often they choose to do so remains to be seen. I see this in keeping with our focus on experimentation and discovery, rather than being very directly tied to my being out for awhile, and my hope is that we find this works out very well and we can continue to play with this additional type of content on OCOT long after I return. My goal is to bring you interesting people and perspectives, along with the extra IQ points you can gain from visiting OCOT! So be watching this space over the next few weeks for some additional new posts by these individuals, and let us know via your comments, how it works for you, your reactions to both this new type of content, as well as the topics themselves.

My thanks in advance to those guests who took me up on this offer, and have fun with the experiment.

OCOT 2.0?  Looking for a Few Brave Beta Testers

Finally for today, I'd like to talk about one last but very exciting bit of new experimental and experiential learning we are going to be starting. We're adding entirely new capabilities to OCOT. As per my previous comments about exploring the boundaries of blogs, I'm also anxious to learn "beyond the blog" and to join forces with you to try out new forms, formats, and features that continue to improve and grow our mutual communication, collaboration, and value. For example, I'd like to learn more about when a wiki type of format is more appropriate for  soliciting more direct and detailed input from the rest of you. I'd like to have us learn more about when the voice of a single author makes sense, and when the collective voice of a group of people creating, editing, and evolving content, conversations, and knowledge make more sense. I'd like to see how well we can blur the boundaries and barriers that formats sometimes put in our way. Is there a more transparent and blended way to have content be "just right" for us and matched to our constantly varying moods, context, and conditions?  As we have more and more options and ways to communicate, we will need to become better at choosing the right tool for the task at hand. 

To do all this, I've been working with a talented developer, Tony Freixas, to create a test site with a whole new look and feel and a mashup of many different features and capabilities that might make sense for the next iteration of OCOT.  At this point, we have the first prototype up and running as a temporary test site, and we're looking for a few brave and curious volunteers to take this prototype for a test run and get their feedback on the experience to help guide future directions and capabilities to bring to all of you out there in OCOT land.

If you have a few hours in the next 2 months and would be willing to try out this new OCOT experience and provide us with your reactions, experiences, and suggestions, please send a short e-mail to Tony and he will send you instructions on how to participate and contribute. My thanks in advance to those volunteers. We'll be back to the rest of you with results in the New Year.

Bon Voyage!

As we all begin to wrap up yet another year that seems to have flown by, and ramp up for the start of 2008, I want to thank each and every one of you for reading, listening, and watching OCOT. I take it as a great honor that you would choose to spend the most valuable currency there is—your time and attention—and I hope you continue to find it to be a good use of both (why else would you come?). I hope that OCOT continues to take you down some very unexpected pathways, which lead to even more unexpected and even greater discoveries. I'm about to head out on some grand new adventures, journeys, and discoveries of my own, and look forward to sharing and learning more with all of you next year. 

Thanks for helping to make 2007 such a truly great year, and here's to making 2008 even better!

w
a
yne
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Wayne Hodgins
Strategic Futurist
Autodesk Inc.
+1-707-803-3579

Serious Play: Are We Humans the Biggest Computer of All?

Would you be interested in a future where the pursuit of fun and enjoyment was one our our major roles in life because it leads to solving extraordinarily large and complex world problems? For example, what if all of us helped to digitize all the content contained in all the books in the world? Almost none of this content is currently available on the Web or in any digital form and as such, is largely inaccessible to most. And would you be interested in a world where the relationship between computers and humans is a very positive and symbiotic one? I know I would. 

I'd like to bring your attention to some of the ways in which this is already happening. Let's see if this excites you so much that you'd like to not only participate in some of these processes, but also start to use some of these models to help solve some of the problems you and your profession or areas of interest face.

In my previous posting "Moving aLOM", I mentioned some of the exciting, yet daunting, challenges of the future of metadata, such as how to create, in staggering volume, some of the more "subjective" metadata—things like the infinite characteristics that describe people, places, and things—where we humans are still the only source. This effort would include things like creating metadata for all the images and videos out there—still a largely unsolved problem—the absence of which not only makes them very hard to find, but also makes the Web and computers very inaccessible to the visually impaired, which, with age, might include a lot of us!

The Exciting Work of Luis von Ahn

Perhaps most notable in this area is a relatively young new professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Luis von Ahn, standing at right in this photo with his PhD advisor Manuel Blum. Luis has already completed some amazing work on what he refers to as "human computation" and how to put "wasted" human cycles to use in solving problems a computer cannot solve at this point in time, but humans can solve easily. Luis also picks up on a theme we have discussed here on Off Course - On Target in many other contexts—the power of the "network effect" achieved by connecting everything and every one together. Human computation is obviously focused on the latter, and Luis wants us to consider having all of our brains connected together as an extremely advanced large-scale distributive processing unit. Not to worry, no wires or direct connections to your head are required!

Before I go any further, and especially if you are more of a visual and auditory learner, let me recommend that you immediately watch this talk called "Human Computation" that Luis gave on July 26, 2006, about the power of human cycles. This 51-minute talk is part of the Google Video Text Talk series (also highly recommended), and while it is long by some current standards, I feel very comfortable recommending this to you, since I'm convinced you'll agree it was a VERY good use of your time (actually Luis' talk only runs 40 minutes, and is followed by about 10 minutes of a good Q&A session).

Another excellent reference for you, which contains more fascinating details and examples of von Ahn's work, can be found in Clive Thompson's article "For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU"  in the June 2007 edition of Wired magazine.

Games with a Purpose

But for those who don't have the time right now to look at these things more, here is a quick synthesis of what I find so exciting and interesting about the innovative use of our human "compute cycles", and the use of "fun and games" for very significant and "serious" results. What von Ahn likes to call "games with a purpose".

One of the most common and effective examples of this type of human computation is one of Luis' first applications, which is known as "Captcha". The name may be new to you, but I'm sure you're already a veteran Captcha expert! Captchas are those slightly difficult to make out words that you are asked to identify and type into a box when you are signing up for web sites. Captchas are used for responses online and in other situations where we want to prevent automated "bots" from generating unending amounts of "spam" or other undesirable exploitations of such online experiences. The problem is how to differentiate between a human response and a computer response, and Captchas are a simple solution to this problem, as well as a simple example of a problem that computers can't solve by themselves.

In itself, this doesn't sound like that interesting of a problem, although certainly it is an annoying one! However, part of what I would see as Luis' brilliance is in the more primary problems he is solving with this process.

In the case of Captcha, the real problem being solved pertains to my initial reference about the challenge of digitizing all the content of the world's printed matter, such as books. For more background on this digitizing and scanning challenge, you may want to refer to my previous posting from Jan 2007 "Books—the NEW old medium". Specifically, the problem is with all the words found in printed matter that scanning and conversion technology cannot make out, because the medium has a crease running through it, or it is partly missing, or other factors which make it impossible for the technology to recognize the words correctly.  Yet, show these words to almost any one of us and we can easily recognize the word.

So all those "fuzzy" words in Captchas are NOT just some random words that are blurred to fool a computer. Instead, these are the images of words which scanning technology has failed to recognize correctly! Luis refers to this specific application as ReCaptcha and you'll find much more information there, as well as instructions and free plugins for you to embed within your own sites, blogs, etc.

And that's just one side of why Luis von Ahn was awarded one of the MacArthur "Genius" awards and a Microsoft Research grant, for he has also managed to put these types of solutions into a game format that starts to look at solving these kinds of problems at a scale that is truly breathtaking! 

Solving World Problems or Playing Solitaire?

In his talks, Luis likes to use a very compelling metric of human-hours, and he often compares statistics on the the amount of human-hours that are "wasted", in his opinion, doing something like playing Solitaire on a computer. I too have always been amazed at the number of people I observe when walking down the aisles of an airplane, for example, who are hard at "work" playing Solitaire, but I had no idea just how much time is spent on this. According to the statistics that Luis uses, over 9 billion human-hours were expended playing Solitaire in 2003 alone! Better yet, he puts this into perspective by comparing this activity to such things as:

• The building of the New York City Empire State building, which consumed about 7 million human-hours, and thus equates to just 6.8 hours of collective Solitaire playing.
• Building the entire Panama Canal, which took 20 million human-hours and amounts to less than a day of collective solitaire playing!

Metadata for All Images?

Now imagine if we were able to put this kind of "human computation" to more effective use AND still do so within the format of games that people can enjoy doing themselves! One example is another one of Luis' creations, and one that has been running with staggering results for over three years called the ESP Game. As we've discussed many times, experiential "learning by doing" is often one of the best ways to learn about something new, so I'd encourage you to not only read about the ESP Game on that site, but to play it for awhile. (Caution: can be very addictive and time consuming!) When you do, you'll see how it puts two or more players (there is also a single player version) into a friendly competition by typing in descriptive words for a given photo (that metadata thing again), and they get points whenever they both type in the same word.

So what? While progress is being made in image recognition technology, this is still largely a problem that computers cannot do. And ask yourself, do YOU take the time to "tag" or create all the metadata for the photos and videos that YOU post, such as who and what is in the photo? Didn't think so. Yet by using this type of game format, the ESP Game has been running for over three years with no drop off in popularity and as of mid-2006, it was very fast, very cheap, and very accurate. If this were done as a popular online game site, it would be possible to label all the images on Google Image Search in just a few weeks! No surprise then that the ESP Game has already been licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search. We humans are relatively competitive animals and we like to do what we enjoy, so this approach appears to have a lot of promise.

Yes, but WHERE is that object in the photo?

Another problem that is even more challenging than identifying WHAT objects are in the image is identifying WHERE they are in the image. To do this, Luis has created another game called "PeekaBoom". The first player sees an image along with a word that describes an object within the image, and then clicks on the image where the named object is located. The second player sees only the object that the first player clicked on and types the word associated to that object. Once the second player guesses the correct word, the two players move on to the next image and switch roles. More details are explained in the video (you really should take the time to watch it!).

Human Computer Relations: Parasitic or Symbiotic?

Luis also notes how this transforms the current relationship between humans and computers from what he calls a parasitic relationship to a symbiotic one where:

"...humans solve some problems, computers solve others, and together we work to create a better world."

Sound far fetched? Well, in the less than two years that his limited experiment of the ESP Game has run, over 75,000 players have come up with over 15 million "agreements" (matched words). This rate would indicate that 5,000 players playing simultaneously could label all images on Google Images in about two months. Think about that...5,000 is NOT a very big number when you consider the numbers on many gaming sites. Therefore, it should be possible to label all the images on the Web in a few months. Again, I strongly recommend that you check out the video to get not only more details, but to see just how accurate, pragmatic, and promising this approach is. 

For example, it turns out that the results of a game such as PeekaBoom can in turn be used to help train computers to recognize objects and their location. Turns out that one of the reasons that computers are not yet very good at this type of object recognition and automated metadata generation is that there is very little data and examples to use to "train" the computers on how to do it. By capturing the results of all the human play in location identification of objects within images, this data can then be used to train computers to do the same thing"—allowing us move on to new challenges... and more fun.

Super Side Effects

I think you'll agree that this approach not only shows great promise in terms of solving some very large scale problems, but has some surprising and equally amazing "side effects", like how some people have used this to help them learn a language. This approach has spawned its own game called Babble, where two English-speaking players are shown a sentence in a foreign language that neither of them speak, and are presented with a list of possible meanings (in English) below each word. Players try to agree upon a set of English words that forms the most coherent sentence. The result is that this activity is surprisingly effective in translating foreign text into English without requiring anyone fluent in both languages. Think of the possibilities of this running at a larger scale!

Another "side effect" of this approach is how many players have noted that they end up finding other people who think very much like them, and thus they have a great sense of "intimacy" and closeness with their counterparts who play these games. Therefore, many  ask if they can find out who their anonymous competitors are to continue the conversation. At this point in time, all the game players are anonymous and no identities are revealed, but one could imagine this being used as a way to help discover other people "like you"—ones you'd want to meet and get to know better.

Common Sense Isn't that Common; yet!

And lastly from von Ahn's work, check out his new game Verbosity, which helps to generate what he calls "common sense facts" (again just more metadata really). One player is given a word and the other tries to guess what it is by completing fill-in-the-blank-type templates, such as "It is a type of ____" or "It contains ___".  The player who entered the original word can answer "true" or "false", but can't use the word itself. All this is very much like some party games that many of you have probably played, but the important difference here goes back to the original point of the summative network effect and how this can all be put to greater use. In the example that Luis shows in his presentation, the word "milk" would have some common sense facts such as;

• It is white
• It is a liquid
• It is often used to eat cereal
• It has lactose

Again, computers can not currently solve this kind of problem, and it is another an example of the need for massive amounts of metadata. Imagine if we started generating massive volumes of these "common sense facts" and they were readily available to all. 

More Competition = Less Carbon?

Lest you should think this is just a "one man show" from Luis von Ahn, I want to point out that there are many others who have been developing, adopting, and adapting similar models. For example, "Carbonrally: Carbon Challenge", which you can learn more about from the Nov. 20th, 2007 Webware post "Carbonrally: My carbon footprint's smaller than yours" by Martin LaMonica, is an application that is showing some great promise for improving the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or the "carbon footprint" of individuals and organizations alike. Carbonrally adds the dimension of some fun and healthy competition to do better than others. As Martin describes it, Carbonrally is "tapping into people's tribal competitive spirit".

Whew!  That's quite an introduction to what I believe is both a powerful and profound pattern emerging—where the natural pursuit of fun, healthy competition, and challenges are combined into a game-based model that has already shown some of the ways we can solve large-scale present and future problems. It also creates a whole new relationship between us and technology. This model is not only interesting and fun, but it is a fascinating example of "user generated metadata", which I mentioned in my previous "Moving aLOM" posting.

Your Turn to Play!

Besides raising your awareness about "human computation" and the power of this approach, I also want to encourage all of us to put more time and energy into figuring out how we can inject more fun into work and other problem-solving situations. As you do so, I think you'll see an important job or task or problem  can be more fun if it's solved with some kind of game play, and where the solution remains very much a human one.

We can not, for now at least, expect computers to come up with such fun and game-based solutions by themselves! 

For starters, if you have websites or other applications where you have problems preventing spam or other misuses, consider taking advantage of some of the freely available plugins and nullities, such as those from the ReCaptcha site. Longer term though, please put some thought into which problems you could address with this model, and the ways you could do so by injecting the fun and challenge of a game-based approach into the more serious problems you need to solve...then share them with us here at Off Course - On Target.

I'm reminded of the great quote from Brian Suton-Smith who said:

"The opposite of play is not work; its depression!"

And I look forward to hearing all the innovative and creative ways you will come up with to solve problems—large and small—and replace depression with play. Have fun!

Moving aLOM

If you are a regular visitor here at Off Course - On Target, (OCOT) you know that metadata—characteristics that describe anything and everything—has been a major part of my life and a major focus for many years. If you'd like the full story of my initial recognition of metadata and its value, you can listen to or read my previous posting "Wayne's Wine Epiphany".

What is metadata?

Sometimes metadata is more commonly called "tags", such as the information you provide for things like photos that you upload or blog entries you create and search for. At a simple and personal level, metadata would include your name, phone number, address, family members, your likes and dislikes, skills, knowledge, etc. These are all of the literally millions of characteristics that describe, and to some extent, define you and the world around you.

Among many other benefits and uses, metadata is critical for improved "findabilty" and discovery, as opposed to searching. It is largely via metadata that we are able to find the "right"  people, places, and things (with "right" referring to our individual situations, context, and needs). This also works in reverse by enabling other people, places and things to find us, where appropriate and wanted.

What's been my involvement?

One of my more significant commitments to metadata started back in 1997 with the creation of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee or LTSC, and within this committee, the formation of the Learning Object Metadata Working Group or LOM. LTSC is a group of volunteers who are devoted to development and implementation of standards for interoperability for use within the worlds of Learning, Education and Training (LET). LOM is a set of standards focused on the metadata required for more effective learning and performance.

I've had the honor of being the Chair of the LOM Working Group for over ten years, and this has afforded me the privilege of working with some of the most dedicated people I know. They have worked tirelessly, and often thanklessly, to produce several fully completed standards for metadata such as the IEEE 1484.12.1 standard for the LOM data model and the IEEE 1484.12.3 standard for the XML binding of LOM to enable the exchange of LOM instances (metadata records).

You may not understand or even be interested in these specifics, which is as it should be for most standards. How much do any of us care or know about such things as TCP/IP, HTTP, or the other standards which make the Internet possible? In a similar way, standards for metadata—of which LOM is but one—are part of what has enabled the improvement  of the creation and interoperability of metadata (though much is still needed).

To our surprise, LOM standards have been implemented broadly, both within the context of learning, education, and training, as well as within an eclectic and extensive list of other domains, including art, history, archives, and human relations. I know of no way to count the amount of such LOM-based metadata nor the number of implementations of LOM, but the numbers are globally dispersed and easily numbered in the millions and beyond.

What's Next?

Now it's time for both LOM and I to move on into our respective next stages and hence the title of this posting. As of January 1, 2008, I will be stepping down as Chair for the IEEE LOM Working Group, and I'm delighted to publicly congratulate Erik Duval for being appointed as the new Chair of LOM. I am about to make some significant changes in my roles and responsibilities, both personally and professionally (more on this in a future posting), and it is time for LOM and metadata overall to evolve to best fit the "Brave New World" we now live in. In spite of his relatively young age, Erik Duval has been one of the longest serving individual experts focused on metadata for learning, education, and training. Based on his work in metadata since the early 1990's, such as the creation of the ARIADNE project which is a large European based consortium focused on knowledge sharing and reuse, Erik was instrumental in the creation of the IEEE LOM WG from its very beginning.  Officially, Erik has served all this time as the Technical Editor of LOM and, along with Tom Wason, they created the initial kernel that grew into the full LOM standard. I could not be happier or more optimistic about the future of LOM and of the advancement of metadata than I am with turning over the leadership to such a capable individual and someone who has become one of my closest professional colleagues.

While those of us who first began to put this focus on metadata knew it was important for the future, I'm not sure that any of us could have imagined the degree to which this would be true or the scale of use and generation of metadata. To meet these new needs and scale will require both the evolution of metadata as we know it, as well as a complete rethinking. Some new leadership and energy will be of great assistance in making this happen. As such, the other main purpose for this posting is to bring your attention to some important and recent developments in the area of metadata; the first is a series of new activities within and related to the current LOM standards, and the second is addressing the longer term future of metadata developments—it's worth keeping your eyes on.

Where is LOM heading?

Here's a short overview of the new activities related to LOM:

• Reaffirmation of the 1484.12.1 LOM standard, which is largely an administrative action required by IEEE for all active standards every five years.  As the name applies this is merely a check that an existing standard is still in active use and will continue to be so. As the millions implementing LOM can attest, this is very much the case.
• Corrigenda for the 1484.12.1 LOM standard, which will provide a list of all the minor (but important) technical corrections and edits to the original LOM standard, which have been discovered by those previously implementing LOM.
• Two New Parts for LOM:  After several years of work led by Mikael Nillson, the Joint DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) / IEEE LTSC Taskforce has just initiated work on two new IEEE standards.  The previous link will provide you with access to all details of the work to date, previous meeting notes, and ways to contribute to these efforts.  As briefly and coherently as I can put it, these two standards are for:
  • Developing a Recommended Practice for Expressing IEEE Learning Object Metadata Instances Using the Dublin Core Abstract Model to meet the growing demand for interoperable definitions of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) metadata terms and IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) data elements, which allow these to be used together in metadata instances.
  • Developing a Standard for Resource Description Framework (RDF) Vocabulary for IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Data Elements. In simpler terms, this standard will  address the increasing demand for definitions of IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) data element semantics, which allow the expression of IEEE LOM instances in applications using Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF). For some data elements, this expression can be achieved using existing, stable RDF vocabularies. The purpose of this standard is to define the semantics of data elements not covered by such vocabularies. This standard forms an important basis for making IEEE LOM useful in this larger metadata context.
• LOM next:  Over the last year or so, we've discussed how we want to make LOM evolve over the longer term. The time has come to consolidate that discussion, gather requirements, and start thinking about how to meet those. Erik and the LOM Working Group have begun a series of open, regular, synchronous discussions in order to first bring everybody up-to-date on these activities, develop a plan of action, and then to begin the necessary new work.
  • These meetings are open to ALL and will be virtual meetings accessible both online and via phone.
  • If you are interested in participating, please either contact Erik Duval directly via e-mail (Erik.Duval@cs.kuleuven.ac.be ) or subscribe to the LOM mail list on the LOM web site. 
  • While those with metadata expertise would be especially welcome, it is equally valuable to get input from a diverse range of others who want to use and benefit from significant improvements in metadata for LET in the future. Please consider adding your input to this important effort.

Trends in Metadata

Metadata is often unnecessarily limited by the popular "data about data" description, but it is so much more than this.  Metadata is perhaps most often applied to "nouns", and my simple minded recollection of the definition of a noun is a person, place, or thing. To date, most of the focus has been on metadata for content (which has been very beneficial and for which much more work is still needed), but the future will include much more attention on the other "nouns"—people, places and things. This post would go on for much too long were I to do justice to any one of these or countless other areas that would benefit enormously from improvements in their related metadata aspects, so I will only list a few areas and provide you with a glimpse of the future potential within. Watch for future developments in metadata for some of the following:

Metadata about PEOPLE

This kind of metadata, especially pertains to our skills, knowledge, abilities, experience, attitudes and competencies.

In one small example, the IEEE LTSC Working Group 20 recently completed a standard for "Reusable Competency Definitions" or RCD, and this Working Group is now looking at other aspects of competencies that would benefit from standards. 

Metadata about PLACES

For example, we are seeing the recent surge of metadata in the use of maps, and GPS metadata is being added to things like Google Earth", which will enable us to answer questions such as:

• "Where are you now?"
• "Where was this photo taken?" 
• "What does this location look like?" 
• "What happened here in 1782?"

Imagine the possibilities as more locations become "smart" with metadata about them and related to them. Photos and video might show what they look like now and in the past. Metadata will be increasingly available for every building, its contents, furniture, features, hazardous materials, fire extinguisher and escape information to name but a very few metadata elements.

Metadata about THINGS

Metadata about things provides the characteristics of all the physical objects in the world, such as machines, parts, equipment, food, furniture, music...well you get the idea. 

Add to this all the non-physical things, such as objects created in virtual worlds. Now imagine if all these "things" were connected and could start to share this information and "talk" to each other.

You are already familiar with bar codes, which contain the metadata for everyday things, as well as the more recent use of RFID tags to electronically capture and broadcast all of this metadata. This is sometimes referred to as "the Internet of things". See the 2005 executive summary of the Internet of Things for one perspective and more detail on this concept.

For example, imagine if all the ingredients in your kitchen made all their metadata available, such as how full or empty they are, when they are about to expire, which combinations might let you make a dinner along the lines of what you desire, and without a trip to the store.  It's all just metadata!

To learn more:

• Wikipedia provides this brief overview on the related topic of object hyperlinking.
• This short BBC article from 2005 discusses how the United Nations was predicting such a "network of everyday objects".

AUTOMATED metadata generation (AMG)

Once you start to consider the massive amount of metadata that is required and possible for each and every person, place, and thing, you quickly "do the math" and realize the overwhelming problem of "How will all this metadata ever be created?" Our initial tendency has been to assume that metadata is all human generated—literally "typed in" to forms. If this were true, there would not be much of a future for metadata, since there is most likely more metadata than data and certainly more metadata than there are people, places, or things! 

While human generated metadata, especially the more "subjective" metadata elements, will always play an ever more critical role in the future, it will become the minority of the overall volume of metadata. Increasingly, metadata will be generated automatically.

To learn more:

• See this article on AMG which comes from one of the many groups that Professor Erik Duval leads at KU Leuven, a prestigious Belgian university.

USER GENERATED metadata

Did you know that literally all the metadata for all the CD's and music you see displayed on your MP3 players, iPods and computers, artist name, title, album name, etc. is generated by other listeners, such as yourself and NOT by the record companies or publishers? What if we could tap into the metadata that each one of us (eventually all 6.6 billion of us) are probably generating every day, such as the tags and captions we add to photos, the PowerPoint slides we create, and search terms we use, to name but a few?  Such is the power of user generated metadata and there will be much work in the future to increase the generation of, capturing, and putting to effective use the flood of metadata that will result.

ATTENTION metadata

Attention metadata is a common term for all the metadata that captures your likes and dislikes, and which can help you find everything from great music to listen to, people to get together with, TV shows and video to watch, etc. We can think of it as the things we "pay attention to"...hence the name.

Attention metadata is what recommender systems are based on. One such effort to address some of the needs for better capturing and interoperability of this type of metadata is that of the attention.xml group. You can listen to this 2004 podcast with some of the originators of attention.xml and this podcast and blog from Alex Barnett discussing attention related topics.

Why would you need this? Consider shopping sites that track your buying patterns, and your opinions and preferences after such purchases, and use these to help you find additional items that you may want (if you let them). How does the system know if you are buying the item for yourself or as a gift for someone special? Currently they do not, and therefore the recommendations become less relevant and you likely stop using them. However as these issues begin to be addressed, there will be more and more "decision support" to help us deal with the growing problem of an economy of abundance and too much choice for those of us privileged enough to live in such situations.

Metadata UNIQUE and SPECIFIC to LET

While some of the metadata standards, such as LOM, are intended to cover the application to LET, most of the initial work to date has been much more general and largely applied to content. There is an enormous need for much greater focus on metadata that is unique and specific to learning, education, and training. This would include metadata to assist with evaluation and assessment—matching learning styles with teaching styles, and helping each of us as unique individuals to have LET options that are just right for us at just the right time and in just the right way.

And trust me, this is but a minor scratch on the vast surface of but one slice of metadata and its very exciting future! 

So LOM, for now....

I certainly have mixed emotions about reducing my direct involvement in LOM and the development of some of these future metadata related topics. However, I can't imagine leaving LOM in better hands than those of Erik Duval and the many, many other dedicated individuals, old and new, who have such dedication and passion for improving learning, education, training, and performance and indeed the world in general, through better use and generation of metadata.

Whether or not you consider taking an active role in this future development of LOM and metadata standards and specifications, I certainly encourage you to pay more attention to the role of metadata and how it serves as a fundamental principle in the future of your life, both personal and professional, and the future of the world around us.

Wayne