ADL Registry - Unique Aspects

Unique Aspects

Unlike a standard Internet search engine, the ADL Registry provides highly-targeted search results, significantly reducing the number of irrelevant matches because digital objects:

• Are intentionally made visible and searchable by the contributor who is best able to accurately describe them and has vetted them.
• Can be available for search and discovery without providing direct access to them.
• Can be discovered even when they are not accessible to general web search engines.

Few would question the value of Web-searching technologies such as Google and Yahoo. However, these technologies do not address important requirements of the learning, education and training communities. Three key limitations are: Google-type Web search uses indexed data that is created by “crawling” through the entire World Wide Web to see what is accessible and machine readable. A good deal of digital content used for learning is not accessible to Web crawlers (by policy or lack of infrastructure) or is unreadable because it is in a digital format that Web crawlers can’t easily interpret or the digital object is not available or indexed. Google-type Web search finds everything and anything that might be relevant; there is no reliable means to filter content for authenticity, validity, currency and other criteria to limit the results to truly relevant learning content. Mission-critical use cases cannot afford the hit-or-miss nature of today’s “index-everything” search strategies. Web searching using Google and similar services provides fabulous value on many levels and will no doubt evolve and improve over time, as search algorithms become more sophisticated. But, the solution to finding content that is intentionally created for specific learning objectives, or that has special, well-crafted, instructional or informational value, and that has been vetted, authorized and made available for use by those who really need it, remains a technical and organizational challenge.

ADL Registry metadata is:

• Expressed using the (LOM)] standard.
• Encoded as Extensible Markup Language (XML).
• Submitted manually through the ADL Registry web site.
• Submitted automatically through RIM-Lite, a system developed to interface with the ADL Registry.