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71-504: Learning Object Metadata is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning. The purpose of learning object metadata is to support the reusability of learning objects, to aid discoverability , and to facilitate their interoperability, usually in the context of online learning management systems (LMS). The IEEE 1484.12.1-2020 – Standard for Learning Object Metadata

142-651: A Learning Management System . It is possible for example, to package learning objects with SCORM specification and load it in Moodle Learning Management System or Desire2Learn Learning Environment. If all of the properties of a course can be precisely defined in a common format, the content can be serialized into a standard format such as XML and loaded into other systems. When it is considered that some e-learning courses need to include video, mathematical equations using MathML , chemistry equations using CML and other complex structures,

213-617: A 250-page document, and have been developed over three years under the leadership of Norm Friesen , and through consultation with experts across Canada and throughout the world. These guidelines are also available at no charge from the CanCore Website. ANZ-LOM is a metadata profile developed for the education sector in Australia and New Zealand. The profile sets obligations for elements and illustrates how to apply controlled vocabularies, including example regional vocabularies used in

284-498: A block is always a multiple of 16, and is often a multiple of 128, but is otherwise arbitrary. Characters required for a given script may be spread out over several different, potentially disjunct blocks within the codespace. Each code point is assigned a classification, listed as the code point's General Category property. Here, at the uppermost level code points are categorized as one of Letter, Mark, Number, Punctuation, Symbol, Separator, or Other. Under each category, each code point

355-507: A book in a library has a record in the card catalog , learning objects must also be tagged with metadata. The most important pieces of metadata typically associated with a learning object include: A mutated learning object is, according to Michael S. Shaw, MSc (2003), a learning object that has been "re-purposed and/or re-engineered, changed or simply re-used in some way different from its original intended design". In other words, educational content or learning materials, initially designed for

426-727: A calendar year and with rare cases where the scheduled release had to be postponed. For instance, in April 2020, a month after version 13.0 was published, the Unicode Consortium announced they had changed the intended release date for version 14.0, pushing it back six months to September 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Unicode 16.0, the latest version, was released on 10 September 2024. It added 5,185 characters and seven new scripts: Garay , Gurung Khema , Kirat Rai , Ol Onal , Sunuwar , Todhri , and Tulu-Tigalari . Thus far,

497-432: A comprehensive catalog of character properties, including those needed for supporting bidirectional text , as well as visual charts and reference data sets to aid implementers. Previously, The Unicode Standard was sold as a print volume containing the complete core specification, standard annexes, and code charts. However, version 5.0, published in 2006, was the last version printed this way. Starting with version 5.2, only

568-565: A definition from the Wisconsin Online Resource Center, Robert J. Beck suggests that learning objects have the following key characteristics: The following is a list of some of the types of information that may be included in a learning object and its metadata: One of the key issues in using learning objects is their identification by search engines or content management systems. This is usually facilitated by assigning descriptive learning object metadata . Just as

639-510: A double relation with the LOM, since not only can the LOM provide metadata on the vocabularies in a VDEX instance, but VDEX can be used to describe the controlled vocabularies which are the value space for many LOM elements. LOM records can be transported between systems using a variety of protocols, perhaps the most widely used being OAI-PMH . For UK Further and Higher Education, the most relevant family of application profiles are those based around

710-575: A full semantic duplicate of the Latin alphabet, because legacy CJK encodings contained both "fullwidth" (matching the width of CJK characters) and "halfwidth" (matching ordinary Latin script) characters. The Unicode Bulldog Award is given to people deemed to be influential in Unicode's development, with recipients including Tatsuo Kobayashi , Thomas Milo, Roozbeh Pournader , Ken Lunde , and Michael Everson . The origins of Unicode can be traced back to

781-489: A group; for example, although the elements 9.2 ( Description ) and 9.1 ( Purpose ) can only occur once within each instance of the Classification container element, the Classification element may be repeated - thus allowing many descriptions for different purposes. The data model also specifies the value space and datatype for each of the simple data elements. The value space defines the restrictions, if any, on

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852-429: A handful of scripts—often primarily between a given script and Latin characters —not between a large number of scripts, and not with all of the scripts supported being treated in a consistent manner. The philosophy that underpins Unicode seeks to encode the underlying characters— graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than graphical distinctions considered mere variant glyphs thereof, that are instead best handled by

923-468: A learning object as "any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training". Chiappe defined Learning Objects as: "A digital self-contained and reusable entity, with a clear educational purpose, with at least three internal and editable components: content, learning activities and elements of context. The learning objects must have an external structure of information to facilitate their identification, storage and retrieval:

994-402: A learning object. IEEE 1484.12.1 is the first part of a multipart standard, and describes the LOM data model. The LOM data model specifies which aspects of a learning object should be described and what vocabularies may be used for these descriptions; it also defines how this data model can be amended by additions or constraints. Other parts of the standard are being drafted to define bindings of

1065-534: A low-surrogate code point forms a surrogate pair in UTF-16 in order to represent code points greater than U+FFFF . In principle, these code points cannot otherwise be used, though in practice this rule is often ignored, especially when not using UTF-16. A small set of code points are guaranteed never to be assigned to characters, although third-parties may make independent use of them at their discretion. There are 66 of these noncharacters : U+FDD0 – U+FDEF and

1136-697: A metadata profile developed for the education sector in Spain. It is available in Spanish. LOM-GR, also known as "LOM-GR Photodentro " is the Greek LOM application profile for educational resources, currently being used for resources related to school education. It was published in 2012 and is currently available in Greek and English. It is maintained by CTI DIOPHANTUS as part of the " Photodentro Federated Architecture for Educational Content for Schools" that includes

1207-632: A number of educational content repositories (for Learning Objects, Educational Video, and User Generated Content) and the Greek National Aggregator of Educational Content accumulating metadata from collections stored in repositories of other organizations. LOM-GR is a working specification of the TC48/WG3 working group of the Hellenic Organization for Standardization . Other application profiles are those developed by

1278-593: A part of the work with the national standardization group TK450 at Swedish Standards Institute . TWLOM is the Taiwanese LOM profile that is managed by Industrial Development and Promotion of Archives and e-Learning Project LOM-FR is a metadata profile developed for the education sector in France. This application profile was first published in 2006. NL LOM is the Dutch metadata profile for educational resources in

1349-535: A project run by Deborah Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley was founded in 2002 with the goal of funding proposals for scripts not yet encoded in the standard. The project has become a major source of proposed additions to the standard in recent years. The Unicode Consortium together with the ISO have developed a shared repertoire following the initial publication of The Unicode Standard : Unicode and

1420-399: A properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose. This design decision was made based on the assumption that only scripts and characters in "modern" use would require encoding: Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities. Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in

1491-533: A specific domain, may be intentionally or unintentionally, repurposed or applied, or become relevant in some significant way to the learner or situation, even though it is from a totally different domain. This interpretation aligns with the idea that the inherent properties of the learning objects remain constant, but their application becomes beneficial and adaptable across diverse domains. Shaw's speculative interpretation suggests an intrinsic stimulation of cognitive flexibility and creative reuse of learning resources for

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1562-558: A total of 168 scripts are included in the latest version of Unicode (covering alphabets , abugidas and syllabaries ), although there are still scripts that are not yet encoded, particularly those mainly used in historical, liturgical, and academic contexts. Further additions of characters to the already encoded scripts, as well as symbols, in particular for mathematics and music (in the form of notes and rhythmic symbols), also occur. The Unicode Roadmap Committee ( Michael Everson , Rick McGowan, Ken Whistler, V.S. Umamaheswaran) maintain

1633-654: A universal encoding than the original Unicode architecture envisioned. Version 1.0 of Microsoft's TrueType specification, published in 1992, used the name "Apple Unicode" instead of "Unicode" for the Platform ID in the naming table. The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development. Full members include most of the main computer software and hardware companies (and few others) with any interest in text-processing standards, including Adobe , Apple , Google , IBM , Meta (previously as Facebook), Microsoft , Netflix , and SAP . Over

1704-599: Is antithetical ... to pedagogy and teaching. Unicode Unicode , formally The Unicode Standard , is a text encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 of the standard defines 154 998 characters and 168 scripts used in various ordinary, literary, academic, and technical contexts. Many common characters, including numerals, punctuation, and other symbols, are unified within

1775-413: Is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding". In this document, entitled Unicode 88 , Becker outlined a scheme using 16-bit characters: Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as "wide-body ASCII " that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In

1846-428: Is more than just a repertoire within which characters are assigned. To aid developers and designers, the standard also provides charts and reference data, as well as annexes explaining concepts germane to various scripts, providing guidance for their implementation. Topics covered by these annexes include character normalization , character composition and decomposition, collation , and directionality . Unicode text

1917-457: Is not padded. There are a total of 2 + (2 − 2 ) = 1 112 064 valid code points within the codespace. (This number arises from the limitations of the UTF-16 character encoding, which can encode the 2 code points in the range U+0000 through U+FFFF except for the 2 code points in the range U+D800 through U+DFFF , which are used as surrogate pairs to encode the 2 code points in

1988-553: Is not reusable in a different context. If a learning object is reusable in many contexts, it isn’t particularly useful in any. In Three Objections to Learning Objects and E-learning Standards Archived 2021-04-15 at the Wayback Machine , Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University, points out that the word neutrality in itself implies a state or position that

2059-417: Is processed and stored as binary data using one of several encodings , which define how to translate the standard's abstracted codes for characters into sequences of bytes. The Unicode Standard itself defines three encodings: UTF-8 , UTF-16 , and UTF-32 , though several others exist. Of these, UTF-8 is the most widely used by a large margin, in part due to its backwards-compatibility with ASCII . Unicode

2130-480: Is projected to include 4301 new unified CJK characters . The Unicode Standard defines a codespace : a sequence of integers called code points in the range from 0 to 1 114 111 , notated according to the standard as U+0000 – U+10FFFF . The codespace is a systematic, architecture-independent representation of The Unicode Standard ; actual text is processed as binary data via one of several Unicode encodings, such as UTF-8 . In this normative notation,

2201-603: Is the Norwegian LOM profile. The profile is managed by NSSL (The Norwegian Secretariat for Standardization of Learning Technologies) ISRACORE is the Israeli LOM profile. The Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL) and Inter University Computational Center (IUCC) have teamed up to manage and establish an e-learning objects database. SWE-LOM is the Swedish LOM profile that is managed by IML at Umeå University as

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2272-588: Is the latest revision of an internationally recognised open standard (published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association, New York) under the LTSC sponsorship for the description of “ learning objects ". Relevant attributes of learning objects to be described include: type of object; author; owner; terms of distribution; format; and pedagogical attributes, such as teaching or interaction style. The IEEE working group that developed

2343-400: Is then further subcategorized. In most cases, other properties must be used to adequately describe all the characteristics of any given code point. The 1024 points in the range U+D800 – U+DBFF are known as high-surrogate code points, and code points in the range U+DC00 – U+DFFF ( 1024 code points) are known as low-surrogate code points. A high-surrogate code point followed by

2414-916: Is useful for sharing metadata across a wide range of disparate services. Since the LOM standard used Dublin Core as a starting point, refining the Simple DC schema with qualifiers relevant to learning objects, there is some overlap between the LOM and DC standards. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is also working on a set of terms which allow the Dublin Core Element Set to be used with greater semantic precision (Qualified Dublin Core). The Dublin Education Working Group aims to provide refinements of Dublin Core for

2485-481: The UK LOM Core . The UK LOM Core is currently a draft schema researched by a community of practitioners to identify common UK practice in learning object content, by comparing 12 metadata schemas. UK LOM is currently legacy work, it is not in active development. CanCore provides detailed guidance for the interpretation and implementation of each data element in the LOM standard. These guidelines (2004) constitute

2556-571: The typeface , through the use of markup , or by some other means. In particularly complex cases, such as the treatment of orthographical variants in Han characters , there is considerable disagreement regarding which differences justify their own encodings, and which are only graphical variants of other characters. At the most abstract level, Unicode assigns a unique number called a code point to each character. Many issues of visual representation—including size, shape, and style—are intended to be up to

2627-665: The "classification" element. The ANZ-LOM profile was first published by The Le@rning Federation (TLF) in January, 2008. The Australian Vocational Training and Education (VET) sector uses an application profile of the IEEE LOM called Vetadata. The profile contains five mandatory elements, and makes use of a number of vocabularies specific to the Australian VET sector. This application profile was first published in 2005. The Vetadata and ANZ-LOM profiles are closely aligned. NORLOM

2698-578: The 1980s, to a group of individuals with connections to Xerox 's Character Code Standard (XCCS). In 1987, Xerox employee Joe Becker , along with Apple employees Lee Collins and Mark Davis , started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. With additional input from Peter Fenwick and Dave Opstad , Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system in August 1988, tentatively called Unicode". He explained that "the name 'Unicode'

2769-528: The Celebrate project and the metadata profile that is part of the SCORM reference model. Learning object The core idea of the use of learning objects is characterized by the following: discoverability , reusability, and interoperability. To support discoverability, learning objects are described by Learning Object Metadata, formalized as IEEE 1484.12 Learning object metadata . To support reusability,

2840-467: The IEEE LOM XML binding. The LOM comprises a hierarchy of elements . At the first level, there are nine categories, each of which contains sub-elements; these sub-elements may be simple elements that hold data, or may themselves be aggregate elements, which contain further sub-elements. The semantics of an element are determined by its context: they are affected by the parent or container element in

2911-631: The IEEE LOM data model and specifies that the IEEE XML binding should be used. Thus, we can now use the term 'LOM' in referring to both the IEEE standard and version 1.3 of the IMS specification. The IMS LRM specification also provides an extensive Best Practice and Implementation Guide , and an XSL transform that can be used to migrate metadata instances from the older versions of the IMS LRM XML binding to

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2982-723: The IMS Consortium proposed a series of specifications such as the IMS Content package . And to support interoperability, the U.S. military's Advanced Distributed Learning organization created the Sharable Content Object Reference Model . Learning objects were designed in order to reduce the cost of learning, standardize learning content, and to enable the use and reuse of learning content by learning management systems. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) defines

3053-567: The ISO's Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) use identical character names and code points. However, the Unicode versions do differ from their ISO equivalents in two significant ways. While the UCS is a simple character map, Unicode specifies the rules, algorithms, and properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. Thus, The Unicode Standard includes more information, covering in-depth topics such as bitwise encoding, collation , and rendering. It also provides

3124-412: The LOM as a data or service provider, it is not necessary to support all the elements in the data model, nor need the LOM data model limit the information which may be provided. The creation of an application profile allows a community of users to specify which elements and vocabularies they will use. Elements from the LOM may be dropped and elements from other metadata schemas may be brought in; likewise,

3195-642: The LOM data model, i.e. define how LOM records should be represented in XML and RDF ( IEEE 1484.12.3 and IEEE 1484.12.4 respectively). This article focuses on the LOM data model rather than issues relating to XML or other bindings. IMS Global Learning Consortium is an international consortium that contributed to the drafting of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (together with the ARIADNE Foundation) and endorsed early drafts of

3266-625: The Netherlands. This application profile was the result of merging the Dutch higher education LOM profile with the one used in primary and secondary Dutch education. The final version was released in 2011. LOM-CH is a metadata profile developed for the education sector in Switzerland. It is currently available in French and German. This application profile was published in July 2014. LOM-ES is

3337-496: The core specification, published as a print-on-demand paperback, may be purchased. The full text, on the other hand, is published as a free PDF on the Unicode website. A practical reason for this publication method highlights the second significant difference between the UCS and Unicode—the frequency with which updated versions are released and new characters added. The Unicode Standard has regularly released annual expanded versions, occasionally with more than one version released in

3408-556: The data model as part of the IMS Learning Resource Meta-data specification (IMS LRM, versions 1.0 – 1.2.2). Feedback and suggestions from the implementers of IMS LRM fed into the further development of the LOM, resulting in some drift between version 1.2 of the IMS LRM specification and what was finally published at the LOM standard. Version 1.3 of the IMS LRM specification realigns the IMS LRM data model with

3479-446: The data that can be entered for that element. For many elements, the value space allows any string of Unicode character to be entered, whereas other elements entries must be drawn from a declared list (i.e. a controlled vocabulary ) or must be in a specified format (e.g. date and language codes). Some element datatypes simply allow a string of characters to be entered, and others comprise two parts, as described below: When implementing

3550-475: The discretion of the software actually rendering the text, such as a web browser or word processor . However, partially with the intent of encouraging rapid adoption, the simplicity of this original model has become somewhat more elaborate over time, and various pragmatic concessions have been made over the course of the standard's development. The first 256 code points mirror the ISO/IEC 8859-1 standard, with

3621-401: The following versions of The Unicode Standard have been published. Update versions, which do not include any changes to character repertoire, are signified by the third number (e.g., "version 4.0.1") and are omitted in the table below. The Unicode Consortium normally releases a new version of The Unicode Standard once a year. Version 17.0, the next major version,

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3692-526: The group. By the end of 1990, most of the work of remapping existing standards had been completed, and a final review draft of Unicode was ready. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991, and the first volume of The Unicode Standard was published that October. The second volume, now adding Han ideographs, was published in June 1992. In 1996, a surrogate character mechanism

3763-426: The hierarchy and by other elements in the same container. For example, the various Description elements (1.4, 5.10, 6.3, 7.2.2, 8.3 and 9.3) each derive their context from their parent element. In addition, description element 9.3 also takes its context from the value of element 9.1 Purpose in the same instance of Classification . The data model specifies that some elements may be repeated either individually or as

3834-562: The intent of trivializing the conversion of text already written in Western European scripts. To preserve the distinctions made by different legacy encodings, therefore allowing for conversion between them and Unicode without any loss of information, many characters nearly identical to others , in both appearance and intended function, were given distinct code points. For example, the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block encompasses

3905-410: The issues become very complex, especially if the systems needs to understand and validate each structure and then place it correctly in a database. In 2001, David Wiley criticized learning object theory in his paper, The Reusability Paradox which is summarized by D'Arcy Norman Archived 2021-05-02 at the Wayback Machine as, If a learning object is useful in a particular context, by definition it

3976-403: The last two code points in each of the 17 planes (e.g. U+FFFE , U+FFFF , U+1FFFE , U+1FFFF , ..., U+10FFFE , U+10FFFF ). The set of noncharacters is stable, and no new noncharacters will ever be defined. Like surrogates, the rule that these cannot be used is often ignored, although the operation of the byte order mark assumes that U+FFFE will never be the first code point in

4047-552: The learner. Shaw also introduces the term "contextual learning object", to describe a learning object with high specificity, that has been "designed to have specific meaning and purpose to an intended learner". This may be useful if the intent involves just-in-time learning and the individual needs of individual learners. Before any institution invests a great deal of time and energy into building high-quality e-learning content (which can cost over $ 10,000 per classroom hour), it needs to consider how this content can be easily loaded into

4118-637: The list of scripts that are candidates or potential candidates for encoding and their tentative code block assignments on the Unicode Roadmap page of the Unicode Consortium website. For some scripts on the Roadmap, such as Jurchen and Khitan large script , encoding proposals have been made and they are working their way through the approval process. For other scripts, such as Numidian and Rongorongo , no proposal has yet been made, and they await agreement on character repertoire and other details from

4189-516: The metadata." The following definitions focus on the relation between learning object and digital media. RLO-CETL, a British inter-university Learning Objects Center, defines "reusable learning objects" as "web-based interactive chunks of e-learning designed to explain a stand-alone learning objective". Daniel Rehak and Robin Mason define it as "a digitized entity which can be used, reused or referenced during technology supported learning". Adapting

4260-675: The modern text (e.g. in the union of all newspapers and magazines printed in the world in 1988), whose number is undoubtedly far below 2 = 16,384. Beyond those modern-use characters, all others may be defined to be obsolete or rare; these are better candidates for private-use registration than for congesting the public list of generally useful Unicode. In early 1989, the Unicode working group expanded to include Ken Whistler and Mike Kernaghan of Metaphor, Karen Smith-Yoshimura and Joan Aliprand of Research Libraries Group , and Glenn Wright of Sun Microsystems . In 1990, Michel Suignard and Asmus Freytag of Microsoft and NeXT 's Rick McGowan had also joined

4331-559: The previous environment of a myriad of incompatible character sets , each used within different locales and on different computer architectures. Unicode is used to encode the vast majority of text on the Internet, including most web pages , and relevant Unicode support has become a common consideration in contemporary software development. The Unicode character repertoire is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646 , each being code-for-code identical with one another. However, The Unicode Standard

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4402-828: The range U+10000 through U+10FFFF .) The Unicode codespace is divided into 17 planes , numbered 0 to 16. Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), and contains the most commonly used characters. All code points in the BMP are accessed as a single code unit in UTF-16 encoding and can be encoded in one, two or three bytes in UTF-8. Code points in planes 1 through 16 (the supplementary planes ) are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16 and encoded in four bytes in UTF-8 . Within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters. The size of

4473-490: The specific needs of the education community. Many other education-related specifications allow for LO metadata to be embedded within XML instances, such as: describing the resources in an IMS Content Package or Resource List; describing the vocabularies and terms in an IMS VDEX (Vocabulary Definition and Exchange) file; and describing the question items in an IMS QTI (Question and Test Interoperability) file. The IMS Vocabulary Definition and Exchange (VDEX) specification has

4544-499: The standard and are not treated as specific to any given writing system. Unicode encodes 3790 emoji , with the continued development thereof conducted by the Consortium as a part of the standard. Moreover, the widespread adoption of Unicode was in large part responsible for the initial popularization of emoji outside of Japan. Unicode is ultimately capable of encoding more than 1.1 million characters. Unicode has largely supplanted

4615-439: The standard defined learning objects, for the purposes of the standard, as being "any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training." This definition has struck many commentators as being rather broad in its scope, but the definition was intended to provide a broad class of objects to which LOM metadata might usefully be associated rather than to give an instructional or pedagogic definition of

4686-418: The two-character prefix U+ always precedes a written code point, and the code points themselves are written as hexadecimal numbers. At least four hexadecimal digits are always written, with leading zeros prepended as needed. For example, the code point U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN is padded with two leading zeros, but U+13254 𓉔 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH O004 ( [REDACTED] )

4757-618: The user communities involved. Some modern invented scripts which have not yet been included in Unicode (e.g., Tengwar ) or which do not qualify for inclusion in Unicode due to lack of real-world use (e.g., Klingon ) are listed in the ConScript Unicode Registry , along with unofficial but widely used Private Use Areas code assignments. There is also a Medieval Unicode Font Initiative focused on special Latin medieval characters. Part of these proposals has been already included in Unicode. The Script Encoding Initiative,

4828-537: The vocabularies in the LOM may be supplemented with values appropriate to that community. The key requirements for exploiting the LOM as a data or service provider are to: There are many metadata specifications; of particular interest is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (commonly known as Simple Dublin Core, standardised as ANSI/NISO Z39.85 – 2001 ). Simple Dublin Core (DC) provides a non-complex, loosely defined set of elements which

4899-640: The years several countries or government agencies have been members of the Unicode Consortium. Presently only the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs (Oman) is a full member with voting rights. The Consortium has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments. Unicode currently covers most major writing systems in use today. As of 2024 ,

4970-491: Was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. This increased the Unicode codespace to over a million code points, which allowed for the encoding of many historic scripts, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs , and thousands of rarely used or obsolete characters that had not been anticipated for inclusion in the standard. Among these characters are various rarely used CJK characters—many mainly being used in proper names, making them far more necessary for

5041-483: Was originally designed with the intent of transcending limitations present in all text encodings designed up to that point: each encoding was relied upon for use in its own context, but with no particular expectation of compatibility with any other. Indeed, any two encodings chosen were often totally unworkable when used together, with text encoded in one interpreted as garbage characters by the other. Most encodings had only been designed to facilitate interoperation between

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