On Mon, 23 Dec 1996, John Maher wrote: [...]
We are involved in a JISC/JTAP project for the delivery of multiple choice questions in chemistry (and mathematics). See : http://emrs.chm.bris.ac.uk/john/jisc.html and is part of the UK's JISC/JTAP projects : http://www.jtap.ac.uk/ and http://www.jtap.ac.uk/projects/index.html therein.
The questions are being held as a question bank in an Oracle database. The question of the classification of this material, to enable the proper automatic selection of questions has arisen. We would be very interested in contacting other chemists interested in the 'Dublin Core' and such meta classification of chemistry information.
Classification is a notoriously difficult subject and one in which almost everyone has a view :-). I am not an expert in library sciences, and clearly one approach is to use existing library technology for such classification. So, for example, subjects like 'thermodynamics' will have precise hierarchical numbering and this may be a useful approach. On the other hand it involves a lot of work, and you'll find that half the world (or more) disagrees with the classification scheme you have chosen. The major problem is that with new problems - like cyber chemistry and distance education - none of the existing methods are likely to be appropriate. You risk squeezing the problem into the wrong shape of flask. The next option is to do-your-own-thing and hope that the rest of the world follows. Occasionally it does as with HTML - which in purists' eyes is seriously flawed, but it works 90% of the time. Unfortunately chemistry tends to be in the 10% :-(. However the success of the WWW is based on the experiements that didn't work as well as the ones that did - globally it is a very cost-effective way of developing acceptable solutions. The third option is to wait for (or encourage) a 'standards' body to help. For example, there is now a move to introduce standards for distance education, which would certainly be extremely useful - e.g. student records, registration, learning contracts, etc. I doubt you are at this stage yet. Finally, therefore, there is the possibility of building 'virtual critical mass' for your community. An area where we are starting to do this is in the creation of (hyper)glossaries - see http://www.venus.co.uk/ where we have helped people create their own hyperglossaries under a common technology (in that case SGML/CML). It seems likely that you will need a common technology if you are to act as a source of interchange of material and re-use. To do this you will need at least: - a common technology for the actual material. (I doubt that you will find HTML robust enough, and my own suggestion would be SGML). It must allow searching, clear identification of the information components and a clear separation of syntax and semantics. You are also (IMO) likely to need glossaries and/or data dictionaries. - a common namespace for addressing. You need to be able to locate questions precisely and (I assume) correlate the answers with the questions, so I expect that unique IDs for each question-answer become essential. You will also have to decide whether there is any hierarchy in your information, e.g. 'Read the following passge which relates to the next 5 questions'. If glossary experience is anything to go by, this will be quite a tricky problem. I suspect that it will help a lot if you can get a small number of mutually interested groups to get together on this. The real-life component of virtual projects can be important :-) P.
Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100 Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)