British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) Case Study

ABC's of Content Delivery -
Accessibility, Best of Class, Communication

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) champions the use of new technology in the UK school and post-16 learning sectors. In past years the agency has focused on introducing technology solutions that ensure schools have access to high quality content, but recently they have shifted to a more strategic approach—looking beyond the content itself to the way content is delivered.

The Challenge:
In looking at content accessibility, one of the greatest challenges the agency faced was the growing number of taxonomies and vocabularies generated by numerous portals, Web services, content harvesting applications, content repositories and learning platforms. Many of these systems own and maintain proprietary taxonomies, and vocabularies differ across the UK. The school sector lacked a central repository, standards for mapping frameworks, and tools for version control and efficient distribution.

The Solution:
Becta recognized the need for a comprehensive, nationwide system to create, manage and synchronize vocabularies and publish them as metadata.

Becta selected a cross-application taxonomic metadata management solution proposed by the Vocabulary Management Group and SchemaLogic. This solution addressed all key requirements of the Becta Vocabulary Studio initiative:

  • Map between equivalent terms in different vocabularies
  • Identify different terms with equivalent meanings existing in the same taxonomy, and represent the relationship in the classification scheme (tag once; classify many times)
  • Communicate via Web services with other applications, such as front-end portals or backend tagging applications
  • Support an evolving taxonomy and integrate new taxonomies with minimal effort

How It Works:
SchemaLogic and the Vocabulary Management Group built a user-friendly Java client with intuitive workflows for each of the application components—Vocabulary Studio, which allows knowledge workers to create and manage vocabularies within the SchemaLogic solution, and Vocabulary Bank, which allows other staff to browse vocabularies.

“The SchemaLogic solution was designed to integrate with multiple enterprise applications, so it is inherently flexible,” said Mike Collett, director of Vocabulary Management Group. “This allowed our developers to build and integrate a customized interface that will be easy and intuitive for users.”

Challenge Met: 
The SchemaLogic/Vocabulary Management Group solution provided two key high-level benefits for Becta and the UK school sector:

  1. Spending is centralized — a single, overarching taxonomy management system saves tax payers’ money.
  2. A common information model and centralized taxonomy control facilitate effective, efficient knowledge sharing.

“In addition to improving access to information across the school sector, the centralized taxonomy management provided by SchemaLogic has helped to optimize the national digital infrastructure we are developing,” said Barry Kruger, head of content management for Becta. “And the custom interfaces developed by Vocabulary Management Group ensure logical workflows targeted to stakeholders and users alike.”