Educational Technology & Society 5(4) 2002 ISSN 1436-4522 98 © International Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS). The authors and the forum jointly retain the copyright of the articles. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than IFETS must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from the authors of the articles you wish to copy or kinshuk@massey.ac.nz. EM 2 : An E nvironment for E diting and Management of E ducational Metadata Demetrios Sampson Informatics and Telematics Institute (I.T.I.) Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (CE.R.T.H.) 42, Arkadias Street, Athens, GR-15234 Greece Tel: +30-10-6839916/17 Fax: +30-10-6839917 sampson@iti.gr http://www.iti.gr Vicky Papaioannou Informatics and Telematics Institute (I.T.I.) Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (CE.R.T.H.) 42, Arkadias Street, Athens, GR-15234 Greece Tel: +30-10-6839916/17 Fax: +30-10-6839917 vickyp@iti.gr http://www.iti.gr Panayiota Karadimitriou Informatics and Telematics Institute (I.T.I.) Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (CE.R.T.H.) 42, Arkadias Street, Athens, GR-15234 Greece Tel: +30-10-6839916/17 Fax: +30-10-6839917 karadim@iti.gr http://www.iti.gr ABSTRACT Educational metadata are attracting increasing attention, since they can facilitate the description, indexing, searching and retrieving on-line learning objects and educational resources. This paper describes the difficulties raised in retrieving educational resources from the Web, and discusses the current state-of-the- art in educational metadata technologies and the advantages of their use. The most popular software tools for editing and/or managing XML metadata files are presented, and their limitations in the e-learning context are discussed. The paper outlines the design considerations of educational meta-data management toolkits, and proposes EM 2 , an educational metadata management tool, which supports editing and management of XML educational metadata documents. EM 2 aims to facilitate the effective and efficient search, accessibility and navigation of educational resources through e-learning applications and services. Keywords educational meta-data, re-usability of learning objects 1. Introduction Internet-based education and training offer many potential benefits specific to adult learners with emphasis given to learner-centred and self-directed instruction models empowered by web-based educational resources. Indeed, the recent growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) has greatly increased the amount of information and educational resources available to the education community. The full exploitation of this mass body of knowledge resources available on the Web, can be, however, compromised, by the difficulty in describing, classifying and maintaining those resources in such a way that they can be retrieved in an “ educationally efficient and effective way”. Today, the web community has embraced the collection and use of metadata to characterise and index educational resources, which lead to semantically more accurate retrieval of information than search engines. In general sense, metadata is information about data. In the context of resource discovery, descriptive metadata is a characterisation that aims to represent the intellectual