Paper for m-ICTE2005 Formatex Conference Cáceres, Extremadura, (Spain)

I have just completed a paper for m-ICTE2005 Formatex Conference Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain. June 7-10th 2005.

This paper gives an overview of the work undertaken by the JISC SPWS project in designing a meta-framework for the representation of (HE) skills.
Actually, I'm a bit of a fraud for claiming any sort of credit for this paper as it is a very small enhancement to the 'executive summary' document so expertly written by (SPWS project collaborator) Simon Grant! Still - at least I get an all expenses paid trip to Spain out of it - and that sort of thing is of course the whole point of writing papers in the first place. Anyway, I digress. The original executive summary is available on the SPWS project website (in the RHS panel).Without going into it too deeply, the SPWS meta framework uses IMS RDCEO to express 'shared skill concepts' (referred to by me as 'skill topics'). These topics can then be gathered together into something that could be termed a 'skill area'. Likewise skill areas can be grouped into things which we would recognise as 'skill sets'. So we use RDCEO (and VDEX) to form a heirarchical, er, heirarchy of topics and group these into bunches! This approach has been piloted by the LUSID PDP system and has proved quite a sucessful 'blunt instrument'. Oooh yes, and the skill topics may themselves comprise other finer-grained skill topics and so on.The whole purpose for doing this (other then the aforementioned jaunt to Spain) was to aid the implemention of a skills profiling web service interface to LUSID. This we achieved - the results are on the SPWS website - and we also managed to enhance the utterly brilliant Bodington VLE to consume this (RESTian) service. (Me biased?) The Bodington code is available on the Bodington Source Forge site and will be embraced into Bodington v2.8 due ourt later on this year.So I'm off to a place that translates as 'Extremely Hard' (Extremadura). I think that is a reference to the general climate and lack of rain rather than a statement that all residents would be able to win in a fist fight against skinheed out of Viz or Alien or Preditor or whatever. I digress (again).