News

OpenScienceResources: A New Research Project Supported by the EU program eContentplus

24 of March, 2009 By: Marcelo Milrad

CeLeKT is part of a new research project called “OpenScienceResources (OSR): Towards the development of a Shared Digital Repository for Formal and Informal Science Education”. The European Commission has granted 3 years financial support for this effort as part of the eContentplus program. The OSR project will start on June 1st and will last 3 years. A brief summary of the project can be found below:

In an era in which science education inadequacy in formal and informal contexts is becoming a challenging issue, harvesting the potential of digital science education repositories appears to be an attractive option. However, an impressive abundance of high quality digital content already available in European repositories remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers such as: lack of interoperability between repositories, inefficiency of current content organization and metadata structures as well as multi-lingual issues. The OpenScienceResources project suggests a coordinated solution at European level in order to overcome the aforementioned barriers. In order to implement this vision, OSR brings together a balanced mix of high quality science museums and centres,pedagogues, learning technologists, metadata experts, user groups & standardization bodies. The envisaged approach consists of the following steps:

a) study the state of the art in metadata ontological approaches coupling them with modern social tagging and folksonomies,
b)design a set of experiments in order to try out the different theoretical approaches that will be developed and implement them in the OSR Portal,
c) extensively validate the proposed approaches in real-life usage contexts employing the user groups represented in the consortium,
d) document the whole process, spread the results, cluster with similar initiatives & stakeholders and, through the significant networking capacity of the OSR consortium, work towards the establishment of a pan-European digital educational content reference.