Volume 4, Issue 3
Quarter 3, 2008

Creating a Taxon Schema for Your LOR

Many organizations choose to leverage the flexibility of custom taxon schemas in Desire2Learn Learning Repository to develop their own metadata schema or multiple schemas. The concept of taxon schemas is best understood if we define each term separately. A Taxon is a grouping of things according to basic similarities (the Linnaean Taxonomy is Kingdom>Phylum>Class>Order>Family Genus>Species). A Schema is, in this case, an XML schema – which means to define the structure, content, and semantics of an XML document. So a taxon schema is an XML document (schema) that is creating a taxon or a series of groupings and sub-groupings that you want to classify your Learning Objects and Assets under.

How to go about developing a taxon schema seems to elude some of our most advanced users. They are surprised when I show them how simple it really is.

To create a Taxon Schema in the Metadata Tool, you require a limited ability to program in XML. However, half the battle is done if you know anything about HTML and tags. The Tips and Tricks below will help you to build the basic foundation in HTML in order to move ahead to create your own taxon schema.

Tags

The key to commanding a web page to do anything is to create tags. If you want to Bold text, you type a <strong> tag at the beginning of the text and a </strong> tag at the end of the text to stop the ‘bolding’ process. The "< >" starts the tag and the "< / >" ends the tag. Pretty basic. So if I wanted to change a font colour AND emphasize a particular word in my sentence I would write the following code:

This way ‘only’ is emphasized (italized) and the important information is in red.

Always remember to close your tags! Leaving them open means that any tags that occur inside them must close before you enclose the first tags. I think of it as a series of boxes inside each other. You need to close the most interior box first before you close the box it is sitting in, or you’ll end up with a mess.

Moving onto XML

Basically in XML we are more free with the type of tags we create. They also provide a lot more information, like a database. So, <endangered_species> </endangered_species> could be our Root element. Now we could put some elements inside our root element.

We can even add sub-elements for more in-depth information.

If we put that into an XML file, we can collapse by animal and find out more information per animal!

Now let's put this into Metadata Taxons. Instead of endangered animals, we are looking at Learning Items and a list of sub items.

Let’s go a bit more in-depth.

Or even further:

The above example essentially created this path to browse to in the LOR:
Language Faculty > French >Mdm LaFrance

Here's the full text you need to create a compliant XML file:

Getting Started

1. Copy the above text into a TXT editor and save as .xml instead of .txt.
2. Import the file into the Taxon Schema area in the Metadata Administration area.
3. Work on the example to create your own taxon schema.

Remember, you can have many kinds of taxon schemas. You are not just limited to one.

The Community Taxon Schema Challenge

Let's see how many different schemas we can create. Share your taxon schemas with the Community. Send your schema to Community@Desire2Learn.com. Watch for upcoming announcements on how to find Community taxon schemas.

Ask the Expert

Do you have a question for a Desire2Learn specialist that you'd like to see answered in an upcoming edition of 2gether? Send your "Ask the Expert" questions to Community@Desire2Learn.com.