Standards Development

Scope

This standard specifies a common, interoperable set of extensible properties for the description of relationships between resources, particularly resources (including resource components) that are adapted for increased accessibility to a particular user.

The standard includes using all relevant mechanisms for the publication of terminology for such descriptions, including publicly available registries of terms and related metadata resources such as application profiles. The property specifications are conforment to ISO/IEC 19788-1 Metadata for Learning Resources, and therefore also the W3C Resource Description Framework (https://www.w3. org/RDF/).

ISO/IEC 4932 defines a set of AfA terms that can be used in a Digital Resource Description or a Personal Needs and Preferences profile. These constitute application profiles and conform to ISO/IEC 19788-1.

Purpose

This standard is intended to facilitate the description of version characteristics of resources for the benefit of people with disability, and therefore for everyone. It adopts the framework of ISO/IEC 19788- 1, Metadata for Learning Resources. It recognizes that there are ways of describing the relationships between resources that are in common use, but it aims to gather those for a specified purpose for those who need the help.

Resources usually consist of multiple components. These are considered to be resources in themselves in this standard. Many resources require modification for access by people with diverse needs and preferences and many resources require more or less adjustment to the interests and purposes of users. This standard aims to promote the re-use and sharing of resources by enabling useful descriptions of them. It is not concerned with managing the intellectual property issues related to re-use of others’ intellectual property but it is concerned with the provenance of and relationships between resources, acknowledging the underlying ideas or intellectual content that is realised in those resources. Use of the standard may, however, reveal connections that may be treated elsewhere as intellectual property rights.

The focus of the standard is provenance and relationships information for resources (and components) relevant to the use of equivalent and alternative resources (and components), particularly for people with disability.

This standard supports the use of the property ‘relation’ in the Dublin Core Metadata standard (ISO/IEC 15836, https://www.iso.org/standard/71339.html) which designates one resource is ‘related to’ another. The specification of Dublin Core properties, including refinements of the relation property, differs from those conforming to ISO/IEC 19788 so the property is specified in ISO 19788-2 and in this standard to conform to ISO/IEC 19788 while remaining, nevertheless, interoperable with the property in ISO/IEC 15836.

This standard is for describing the provenance of and relationships between the components. When a person with disability uses an adapted resource, they may need to describe the adapted resource compared to others. This may be necessary when the user is working with the resource, or possibly when they want to cite the form of the resource they have used or they are seeking a resource that will be suitable for them.

For users with disability, resources can be changed by the provision of either alternative or equivalent resources. An alternative is defined as a new rendition of an existing resource or component that does not contribute or depend on new intellectual content despite providing a different form for the resource. An equivalent is defined as a resource that serves the same purpose as the original but uses new and  different intellectual content. An example of an equivalent may be a text description of a situation that serves the same semantic purpose but replaces a graphical representation such as a pie chart, documenting the underlying point of the representation without reference to it.

For users with disability, being able to find and use resources that match their individual needs is crucial to their inclusion so knowing the relationship between seemingly similar versions of some content becomes very important. For example, knowing a particular Braille version of a text was automatically generated while another has been done by a human expert may be critical when referencing the text, or finding a simplification of a text produced according to a known modification specification. Descriptions of resources can be available in what are known in this standard as Digital Resource Descriptions (DRDs). To assist with matching resources to users, a user may express the properties of resources that are usable by them in a Personal Needs and Preferences profile. DRDs and PNPs are application profiles and conform to ISO/IEC 19788-1.