This expert group meeting formulated a number of recommendations addressing technical, semantic, as well as political interoperability issues. The second meeting was held in Florence on the 9 September 2005. This meeting, with the ministries of education, was looking at national issues to develop, share, and use educational content.

The expert group meeting in Manchester provided a good occasion to have an overview of experts’ views on the interoperability of learning resource repositories. Discussion focused, among others, on issues of semantic ambiguity that hinders the exchange of resources between repositories, and how current metadata is somewhat inefficient when users are anticipating more personalised search results. Also under discussion was the lack of coherent strategies between users (teachers, learners) and learning technologists.

What the “JISC/DEST eFramework (ELF) for Education and Research” has achieved in the area of identifying the interoperability issues for the service oriented approach, is still left to be desired in the area of semantic interoperability. In the field of thesaurus and vocabularies there is still room for more research and consensus among user communities, was acknowledged at the meeting.

As for the content aggregation between different formats, to facilitate the exchange of  content it was recognised by the experts' team that the difference of feature sets in aggregation formats such as IMS Content Packaging, MPEG 21 Digital Item Description, Metadata Encoding and Transmission Schema (METS), IETF Atom, RSS, OASIS Open Document needs more attention.

Although the objective is clear, it is not easy to rapidly adapt just the structure of an aggregation of assets, but the structure of resources themselves. Areas of application include localisation, multilingual resources, accessibility and adaptation to suit different playback environments.

The meeting in Florence with the representatives of the ministries of education and their agencies covered the local (i.e. national/regional) situation concerning content creation and development, sharing, and use. Especially the use in the classroom would need some more investigation and exchange of ideas since e-learning material needs another pedagogical approach than what is traditionally used. The meeting covered also more extensively the working of FIRE (Federation of Internet Resources for Education) and a demonstration of a federated search using FIRE. More information on FIRE can be found at http://fire.eun.org. Also semantic interoperability was discussed and more in particular the enrichment of content with semantically well-defined metadata.