Co-ordinated by the EUN, MELT (a Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching) is a Content Enrichment project that brings together 20 partners from 14 countries including: 12 Ministries of Education/regional authorities (or organisations representing them), both commercial and non-profit developers of learning content, major learning content repositories, leading researchers into semantic interoperability and experts in large-scale school validations.

MELT content partners will bring together a critical mass of existing educational materials (over 140,000 learning resources/assets) that they will enrich with semantically well-defined metadata. Given the amount of content being made available, a key challenge in the project is to find scalable solutions to the problem of volume metadata creation. This will be done by augmenting the work of experienced indexers with new approaches to ‘folksonomies’ or ‘social tagging and by implementing an automated metadata generation framework. A key goal of the project is also to enrich content with metadata that reflects the actual use of each resource by teachers/pupils in different learning contexts, in order to support the wider use of this content and the development of the European content market.

MELT has been specifically designed to complement and build on work being carried out in the CELEBRATE and CALIBRATE projects and the EUN’s FIRE initiative which have developed a technical architecture for linking repositories that enables a transparent form of federated searching.  Content repositories in MELT will become part of a federation using this architecture and the project will be a key component in the EUN’s plans to launch a pan-European Learning Resource Exchange (LRE). The co-ordinated LRE strategy being developed by the EUN in a number of projects is designed to address the demand from schools, Ministries of Education and other bodies for a system that will allow teachers and pupils across Europe to more easily locate, use and reuse both ‘open content’ and learning resources from commercial suppliers.