Marking the National Curriculum - a New Model for Semantic Mark-up

The use of information structure and metadata for the National Curriculum becomes more and more crucial as the demands for advanced eLearning services increases. In a Swedish pilot project a simple information model was developed and tested on the National Curriculum. An implementation of a common XML based Mark-up Language called TEI was used for the first approach. An alternative model where three different kinds of metadata where identified and separated using RDF, XML and Annotea as core technologies was used for the second approach. Two approaches where tested and evaluated against five criteria. It was found that XML-based mark-up languages like TEI fail in cases where complex metadata and a combination of several metadata models are required. In conclusion we argue for the importance of separating information structure, descriptive metadata (including semantics) and catalogue metadata.