XplanaZine

A year ago, a friend, Stacy Zemke, called me to say that she needed to complete an internship for her Master’s degree work at the University of Oklahoma and, by the way, could I help by sponsoring her internship. Although I was just getting underway with a new company, I was interested in her work — taxonomies and learning object repositories — and I signed on.

Today, I am happy to announce that Stacy’s initial internship research has evolved into something significant and worth talking about — the Living Taxonomy Project (LTP). The LTP is a non-profit, open source project “aimed at creating a global set of open source, standards-based taxonomies for education. The purpose of these taxonomies will be to provide a free cataloging structure for the collection and sharing of education materials around the world.” The goals of the LTP are to 1) create free, discipline-based taxonomies that become cataloguing standards for digital objects and repositories, 2) provide international correlations for discipline taxonomies, 3) create property lists for all discipline taxonomies, 4) integrate the LTP taxonomic work into social bookmarking projects, 5) partner with other open-source groups to provide taxonomic and metadata structures for LMS platforms, learning object repositories, and e-portfolios, 6) and provide valuable resource and research regarding taxonomies, ontologies, metadata, and learning object repositories.

The LTP launches officially this week and I was delighted when Stacy asked me to serve on the board. It is always fun to interact with really smart people and to be involved in a project that can make a difference in the way people learn. I am excited that, in our first week, we have already had a number of volunteers from around the world who want to get involved and help.

My personal interest in the LTP is with regards to the future of information and how we will blend search engines, social bookmarking tools, and taxonomies/ontologies together. My belief is that these three information management tools will continue to evolve and will be used independently and in unison depending on the type of project and information. Of course, the great thing about a project like this is that there are no limits on where it can go or on what can be achieved once a community is formed. Beginning next week, I will be writing a weekly article about this subject and about recent developments at the LTP.

I hope you’ll take the time to go by the site and check out what is there so far. Stacy has done a terrific job putting this together and we need strong participation from the community to achieve our first year goals.