Lexaurus supports new vocabulary service for Dutch Education sector

Vocabulary Management Group's Lexaurus Terminology solution is being used effectively by Kennisnet, the Dutch Education ICT support provider, enabling educational service providers, content publishers, school staff, teachers and students to distribute and share e-learning resources more easily.

Kennisnet EduStandaard Vocabulaire Bank can be seen at:  http://kennisnet.lexaurus.net/home
Try changing your browser language between English and Dutch to see how multilingual Lexaurus can be.

Vocabulary Management Group (Vocman) has announced a significant new client acquisition and deployment of its terminology solution, Lexaurus, with the establishment of a new Vocabulary Bank to support the Education sector in The Netherlands. Kennisnet Foundation, a public ICT support organisation based in Zoetermeer, is hosting the new service via EduStandaard, an initiative focussing on the management of open educational interoperability standards used across the entire spectrum of educational organisations in the Primary, Secondary and Vocational Education sectors.

The EduStandaard Vocabulary Bank will provide a centralised source of standardised indexing descriptions and curriculum terms developed by educational authorities and useable by educational organisations, local authorities, learning system developers and e-learning resource developers in support of content standards; to begin with, the metadata standard "Content-Zoekprofiel", the Netherlands application profile for IEEE-LOM.

Vocman's Lexaurus Bank provides a browse-able and searchable web repository for participants to locate, view and download terminology, in addition to a standards-based, machine-to-machine interface for system integration. Kennisnet will utilize the Bank in combination with Vocman's partner product, Lexaurus Editor, a desktop vocabulary editing tool that enables the construction of new vocabularies, including the mapping and re-use of terms held in existing vocabularies, for publication to the Vocabulary Bank.

The Kennisnet EduStandaard deployment will fully utilise Lexaurus Bank's multilingual functionality. In addition to conformance to internationally established open standards for multilingual thesaurus development, in which 'linguistic equivalent' relationships for terms can be defined, Lexaurus Bank's entire user interface has been translated into Dutch. Users accessing the EduStandaard Vocabulary Bank will therefore experience interface text, terms and term definitions determined by the language settings of their browser; a user whose browser is configured to Dutch will access Dutch terms and term descriptions via a Dutch language interface.

In-line with Kennisnet's goals of nation-wide adherence to agreed, open standards, the import and export configurations for both Lexaurus Editor and Lexaurus Bank utilise the IMS VDEX vocabulary interchange format, which has previously been agreed as the preferred mark-up language for controlled vocabularies within the Dutch Education sector. VDEX allows the exchange and expression of machine-readable lists of human terms that can easily be interchanged. E-learning resources can therefore be inter-linked with structured search data, enabling wider sharing, discovery and re-use across a range of learning environments.

Jos van der Arend, Educational Standards Advisor at Kennisnet Foundation, comments, "Kennisnet encourages and supports schools and education-related organisations to realise innovation in education with ICT. The EduStandaard Vocabulary Bank will make an important contribution and will play a crucial role in this goal, by enabling school ICT staff, teachers and students to access the widest choice of learning resources and achieve the most accurate search results from an increasingly diverse range of sources."