Education.au and Metadata for Events

This paper outlines ongoing work in the area of metadata for events which is being undertaken by Australia’s ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in education agency, education.au. Calendars of conferences, opportunities and celebrations of interest to Australia’s education and training community are a core service of Education Network Australia (edna), education.au’s premier service. The ongoing development of an events metadata application profile for the edna calendars is described, and the current implementation discussed. The process of refinement involves the metadata profile, the metadata repository, the edna website used to display the calendars and the xml services used to share events metadata with external sources. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future directions for events metadata in edna and other education.au projects, including our wish list of increased participatory and automated generation of events metadata, and development of relationship metadata to provide a more integrated user experience across services.