Domain Analysis and Requirements Specification

In order to specify the functional requirements of the LEMO metadata, an analysis of the application domain was necessary. The analysis involves studying the needs of learners in the medical education community, and analysing existing metadata schema applied in that field. The Warwick Medical School (WMS) students and educators participated in the exploratory study conducted earlier in this research (chapter 3). The needs and frustrations discovered by this exploratory study present the guidelines for identifying the functional requirements of developing the DCAP. Additionally, existing metadata schemas that are applied to existing online medical libraries have been analysed and compared to support the process of requirements identification. This section details the needs discovered from the exploratory study conducted with the WMS community. It also presents a summarized comparative analysis of existing metadata schemas in practice. Finally, the functional require- ments for the LEMO metadata schema are elicited based on the results of the domain analysis.

4.3.1 Medical Education Domain Analysis

In order to identify the needs of the medical education community, the recommen- dations resulted from the WMS exploratory study (chapter 3) has been considered. The exploratory study revealed valuable information about the practices and atti- tudes of the medical education community regarding current and suggested tech- niques for searching EMOs on the web from which the following needs has been deduced. The following list has guided the process of eliciting the functional re-

quirements for the proposed LEMO metadata schema.

• Integrating distributed web data sources: the participants in the exploratory study had stated the use search engines such as Google to find information

in addition to other specialised educational libraries such asPubMed Library.

Hence, the need to integrate possible EMOs from various web data sources is evident. The integration process requires having a flexible metadata schema that can accommodate describing different types of EMOs such as videos, blogs, and articles.

• Enhancing the discoverability of the EMOs: the medical education community had a heavy emphasis on the importance of enhancing the search and organ- isation of EMOs based on its subject. Hence, the subject attribute used to describe the EMOs is one of the important features to consider in the LEMO metadata schema in order to provide better discoverability when searched.

• Introducing new attributes that improve organising the EMOs and filtering the search process: the results of the exploratory study had revealed valuable information about the participants’ attitudes towards using filtering criteria. Filtering criteria such as usage rights, type of EMOs, or the subject it belongs to are among the most important attributes considered in the exploratory study. Introducing such attributes in the LEMO metadata schema enables using these features for filtering the search results.

4.3.2 Analysis of Current Practices

A comparative study is conducted in order to identify common elements used in the different APs developed in the field of medical education. Four metadata schemas have been detailed in the background research (chapter 2) and were considered as part of the comparative analysis conducted in this phase of developing the LEMO metadata schema. These schemas were applied in educational libraries in the med-

Table 4.2: Results of comparative analysis of medical metadata schemas

HealthCareLOM mEducator HEAL NLM

1 General PN General PN General PN General -

2 Identifier LN Identifier LN Resource URN LN Identifier PN

3 Title LN Title LN Title LN Title SN

4 Description LN Description LN Description PN Description PN

5 Lifecycle PN Lifecycle PN Creation Date LN Date PN

6 Rights PN Rights PN IPR LN Rights SN

7 Resource Type LN Resource Type LN Resource Type LN Resource Type SN

8 Keywords LN Keywords LN Keywords LN Keywords LN

9 Classification PN Classification PN Classification PN Subject PN 10 Educational PN Educational PN Educational PN Educational -

11 Relation PN Relation - Companion PN Relation SN

12 Technical PN Technical PN Technical LN Technical -

ical education field. The four metadata schemas are HealthCare LOM, mEducator, HEAL, and NLM. These schemas are developed as Application Profiles of existing well-established metadata. More details about the aims of developing these APs and the organisations responsible for creating and maintaining them have been explained in the background research (Chapter 2) presented in the thesis. The analysis of these four schemas compared the core elements composing each metadata schema. Each metadata schema consists of a set of elements and rules that govern their relations where an element might be represented as a Parent Node (PN), Leaf Node (LF), or Single Node (SN). The definition of each node is as follows. A Parent Node (PN) is an element that is composed of a set of elements that are leaf nodes in the schema. A Leaf Node (LF) is an element that is a child node of another PN and has no children, while a Single Node (SN) is an element that is descendent directly from the root and is not composed of any children. The comparative analysis results are outlined in Table 4.2 where the core element of each AP are elicited along with how they are represented in that AP.

The analysis result has shown that the four metadata schemas have common elements between them. Identifier, Title, and Description are core elements in all of the four schemas. Mostly, they are represented as LN or PN. Additional common elements are Date, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Type, Keywords, and Clas-

sification elements. The analysis revealed that some elements such as Educational, Relation, and Technical are not implemented in all four schemas as shown in Table 4.2. Such elements indicate that the requirements of the organisation or the applica- tion of which the AP is developed for plays a vital role in the elements composing its schema. For example, HealthCareLOM AP focuses on providing information about the educational aspect of the object it describes. Meanwhile, NLM AP focuses on providing information about the relation between the objects it describes and does not provide any metadata about its educational aspect.

4.3.3 Functional Requirements Specifications

The domain analysis has been conducted as two parts: studying the attitudes and preferences of the medical education community, and the analysis of existing prac- tices in the field of medical education. Based on the facts discovered from the domain analysis, the functional requirements have been specified for developing the LEMO metadata schema. The task of eliciting the functional requirements was based on use cases formulated from the domain analysis. These use cases are detailed in Table 4.3 and form the functional requirements in the LEMO AP development process. The requirements are useful for modelling the LEMO metadata schema, regarding identifying the necessary elements in it or the need for extending some elements to achieve the requirements of the AP being developed. Specifying the requirements and documenting the domain analysis results strengthened the commitment towards developing a full DCAP, offering the shift from the DC flat metadata schema to a more complex one that provides extensible and semantically richer metadata ele- ments.

Table 4.3: Use cases representing the functional requirements of the LEMO AP Use case description

1 Facilitate the description of EMOs collected from various web data sources of different types.

2 Enable automatic harvesting and mapping of metadata from web data sources into the LEMO metadata schema.

3 Enable semantic enrichment of metadata elements that will aid in enhancing the description of EMOs and improve its retrieval.

4 Support the categorization of EMOs based on its subjects, type, or usage rights.

5 Support building connections between EMOs that were not previously linked.