The evolution of metadata from standards to semantics in E-learning applications

Metadata attempts to describe the content, format, purpose and structure of data. Over the past few years, the IEEE-LOM standard has dominated the metadata world in e-learning applications. However, with the advent of the Semantic Web, e-learning applications are beginning to evolve their metadata representation from these standards by adding semantic structure or by converting entirely to semantic representations of structure. This shift enables the implementation of a range of new tools which can reason over the metadata, providing added value from the stored data. This review paper summarizes this evolution of metadata used in e-learning applications from standards to semantic representation.