The Actual Use of Metadata in Ariadne: an Empirical Analysis

In this paper, we present the first results of our empirical analysis for the actual use that is made of metadata in Learning Object Repositories, more specifically in the ARIADNE Knowledge Pool System (KPS). We analyze metadata information provided by indexers when they introduce new learning objects into the KPS. This gives a clear indication about their understanding of metadata elements, values, etc. Finally, we study the correlation between metadata elements filled-in by those indexers. These results provide us with empirical guidelines to asses the development of application profiles and metadata toolsets.