Description

Other (English)

Background

The DALIA (Data Literacy Alliance) project aims to develop a platform for FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) teaching and learning materials on data literacy, data competencies, and research data management (RDM) skills within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the RDM landscape. Such a platform thrives on the participation of users who want to search, create, manage, or use teaching and learning materials.

To achieve interoperability of teaching and learning materials, their metadata must be schematized. To this end, the DALIA Interchange Format (DIF) version 1.3 was published in 2024 (Geiger, Steiner, Desouki & Lange 2024), providing a framework for transparent, comparable, and platform-compatible metadata. The schema includes descriptions and explanations of the data fields for publishing educational resources online. 

DIF V1.3 has been adopted by multiple consortia and other institutions for submitting the metadata of their open educational resources (OER). To date, 616 sets of metadata have been added to the platform using this schema. Its broad adoption establishes DIF as an important framework for community discourse. Biernacka et al. (2025) developed the latest iteration of their metadata schema for research data management educational resources, with a view to aligning it with DIF. Concurrently, the NFDI Section Metadata, Terminologies, Provenance - Working Group Cookbooks, Guidance and Best Practices, Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur and Data Literacy Alliance DALIA (2025) have published guidelines for annotating and submitting OER materials to the DALIA platform using DIF attributes. Throughout DIF's ongoing development, findings have been disseminated at various events (Geiger, Desouki et al. 2025, Geiger, Steiner et al. 2025, Steiner, Geiger et al. 2025b, Steiner, Geiger et al. 2025c, Steiner, Desouki et al. 2025) and intensively discussed within the OER research community. Key discussion forums included the OER.net working group (see Bergmann et al., 2025) and NFDI's Section Education and Training (EduTrain). As DIF is the data model for OER metadata, and the underlying MoDALIA ontology (BMFTR DALIA project 2025) encodes it in an RDF schema, our team also engaged in intensive discussions to address requirements of compatibility.

The research community and our team identified additional requirements specifically regarding values and formats for metadata attributes. Most issues fell into these categories:

1. Imprecise or missing intensional definitions, e.g., unclear distinctions between learning resource types like "tutorial" vs. "course".

2. Terminology gaps, e.g., missing learning resource types such as podcasts and coding notebooks.

3. Inconsistent domain and range specifications between metadata standards and the MoDALIA ontology. For instance, the class supportinghost of the Relator list by the Library of Congress (2024) was not consistent with the domain restriction of the MoDALIA ontology. This necessitated developing standardized selection lists (picklists and controlled vocabularies) with revised formal definitions. Consequently, DIF version 1.4 introduced a table dedicated for the vocabulary.

This necessitated developing standardized selection lists (picklists and controlled vocabularies). Additionally, several new attributes were introduced to enhance functionality:

• AccessibilityFeature: Specifies functionalities or modifications that ensure the usability of OER for all users, including those with disabilities.

• Teaches: Describes the competency, learning outcome, or learning objective that the target group is intended to acquire or achieve through the educational resource.

• Contributors: Expands the list of creators by different roles to reflect the full range of contributions to the resource.

For the picklists and vocabularies, a new description schema was developed. It consists of:

• The associated attribute

• The name of the picklist item or controlled vocabulary

• Its description

• Its IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier)

• Specification of whether it is a picklist item or controlled vocabulary

• A comment field containing source information (when different from the IRI) and other details

This information was compiled in a concise manner and excluded most source attribution details, information on scope boundaries or schema mappings. We recognized that incorporating additional terms with precise definitions would enhance conceptual clarity. Therefore, a new Glossary for Open Educational Resources (GlossOER) (Steiner, Geiger et al. 2025a) was compiled for the picklist items and controlled vocabularies. This resource contains additional details, especially in the following fields:

• EntryBy: The person who added the entry.

• Definition Language: The language of the definition (e.g., en for English).

• RelationWith: Other terms that this term is related to in SKOS terminology (e.g., broadMatch, narrower, relatedMatch).

• Parent: The immediate broader term (if applicable).

• OWL Type: The OWL construct (e.g., Class, Property).

• Source of Definition: The source from which the definition is taken (if any).

• LinkOfSource/IRI of Definition: A link or IRI to the source of the definition.

• Kind of Source: How the definition was derived (Quotation, Modified quotation, See (for paraphrases), Original by DALIA team).

• Constraints/Vocabulary: The constraints on the range or the vocabulary to which the term belongs.

• Notes: Additional notes such as instructions for the selection, information on the compatibility with other standards and classifications, e.g., Zenodo, DataCite, CRediT.

Both DIF V1.4 and GlossOER are compatible with the underlying MoDALIA ontology.

DIF V1.4 is provided as a PDF document and in table form (Excel) to convey the attributes and the picklists of the teaching and learning materials and their definitions in an easily understandable form and to facilitate communication. The picklists are provided in a separate table. For sake of conciseness, the references can be found in GlossOER that provides a complete list of references and namespaces in a separate table. DIF V1.4 also includes a legend and an example in tabular form. As a new curation form for the platform has been developed, a template for the ingestion process is no longer necessary as it was for DIF V1.3. The tables can also be transferred to technical application profiles. 

We extend our sincere gratitude to the commentators of previous versions. Their valuable feedback and advice were essential for achieving DIF’s present conciseness and consistency.

This project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR) and the funding measure from the EU’s Capacity Building and Resilience Facility with the funding code 16DWWQP07.

The authors are also looking forward to further feedback for the DALIA Interchange Format. Everyone is invited to contact petra.steiner@tu-darmstadt.de and jonathan.geiger@adwmainz.de.

Notes (English)