Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Overview

Led by the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the LRMI has developed a common metadata framework for describing or “tagging” learning resources on the web. This framework is a key first step in developing a richer, more fruitful search experience for educators and learners. Once a cricital mass of educational content has been tagged to a universal framework, it becomes much easier to parse and filter that content, opening up tremendous possibilities for search and delivery.

The LRMI project was spurred by the announcement last year of Schema.org, a project by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! to create a standard way of tagging online content. While not directly connected, Schema.org created the opportunity for projects like the LRMI by establishing a standard markup schema for general web content and then encouraging specialized communities and industries to extend this schema to meet their needs. It is the hope of the LRMI leadership that the metadata schema developed by this project will be incorporated into Schema.org and become the de facto standard for tagging educational resources on the web.