E-TAP: Education Taxonomy Portal

About
E-Tap is a research project that will provide services to facilitate school teachers and students to navigate and look for information they need effectively. Retrieved information is specific to their local needs. E-Tap will be available free for everyone's use. It will be our contribution to the entire education community, which includes the children of today and our hope for tomorrow. Goto E-Tap

Background
Today, the typical mid-sized organization accumulates more information in a week than the whole of mankind did between the years 1 and 1500 A.D. This "information overload" or "digital divide" is finding its way everywhere. The education sector in Singapore and the region is not spared either. Teachers looking in the internet for teaching materials and information relevant to their courses are almost always presented with a huge amount of data. Gathering required information is a long-drawn and time-consuming process running into hours. Students who want to search for information for project work or to supplement their course materials are similarly presented with a huge array of non-relevant data. Parents, education policymakers, tutors, coaching/tutoring agencies, all go through the same fate.

The Opportunity
There are many education-related professionals, teachers and schools who, in the past couple of years, have compiled their own frequently-used education material. Different organizations/individuals have their own small repositories. If all this material (websites, images, audio, video, journals, etc) could be gathered and classified in different categories for easy search, it would be much more relevant and useful to the entire education community.

The e-Tap Solution
E-tap is designed as a portal for search and retrieval of information in different areas related to education. It enables users to contribute and share their content. It consists of a metadata framework and taxonomy for exchange of education-related content.

Aim of the Project
The aim of the project is to demonstrate improved navigation and search efficiency to teachers, students, and other users via tagged education content and education taxonomy Scope of the Project Education content will be organized based on the needs, perspective and vocabulary of primary and secondary schools and junior colleges in Singapore. Later, the scope will be expanded to include schools and education in other regional countries.

Glossary

Content Providers
These will include schools, government-linked agencies (GLCs) and education-content providers

Content
Content will include text, images, audio, video, e-books, etc.

Metadata
In general, "data about data"; functionally, "structured data about data." Metadata refers to structured information that identifies and describes Content. In other words, metadata is definitional data that provides information about, or documentation of, other data managed within an application or environment. E.g. a particular book may be described by its title, author, ISBN number, publisher, year of publishing etc. These are termed 'metadata elements'. The values associated for each of these fields are called 'metadata values'

Taxonomy
Taxonomy refers to the organization of related subject areas connected to a hierarchical structure. This facilitates intelligent search and retrieval.