Providing Semantic Metadata to Online Learning Resources on Sustainable Agriculture and Farming: Combining Values and Technical Knowledge

Sustainable or organic agriculture aims at harmonizing the efficient production of food with the preservation of the environmental conditions for continuing production in a sustained way. As such, it embodies a set of environmental values that are currently taught and learnt worldwide in specific courses or as part of broader programs or curricula. The increased availability of online, open learning resources enables new possibilities for education in the domain of sustainable agriculture and farming. Concretely, portal projects related to sustainable agriculture have been deployed in the last years, using metadata as a mechanism to make resource search more effective in large, multilingual, and heterogeneous content databases. As environmental values are part of the learning needs targeted by those systems, it is required that both axiological descriptions (relating to values) and technical information (related to domain-specific issues) are expressed through metadata records, which requires a clear differentiation of both kinds of descriptions. This article reports on a knowledge modeling approach that fulfils that need and that can be used for the annotation of learning resources using standardized metadata schemas as IEEE LOM. The model has been prepared for the annotation of learning resources in a cross-national federation of organic agriculture repositories called Organic.Edunet, enabling the combination of both kinds of aspects in the formulation of searches. An analytic assessment of the expressive capabilities of the approach is provided using example resources. (Contains 4 figures, 1 table, and 15 notes.)