What is paradata?

(Text excerpted from http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/oer-hackday-2011-03-rpt/ - video interview here: http://vimeo.com/22119778):

Daniel Rehak introduced the Learning Registry, which he described in a blog posting prior to the event as ‘social networking for metadata’.

Rehak discussed some of the difficulties and deficiencies associated with conventional metadata, and the advantages of looking at other types of data when searching and evaluating resources. He provided examples such as paradata (usage data), analytical data, linked data and context, drawing parallels with the ways in which Google and Facebook work.

‘We have a legacy problem of hundreds of different metadata formats and it really doesn't work for finding resources... if you look at the way that Google and Facebook work, they base their data not on conventional catalogues but on very informal things [such as] the usage of data and how things are related ... so we are trying to see if we can capture similar information about learning resources. We believe that by doing this, that “second-class” metadata can be used to build discovery systems and feedback loops.’

Rehak outlined the flow from a resource being made available in the Learning Registry, which then creates a common metadata timeline, effectively re-aggregating metadata to show how the resource is used. This data can then be used a social way. They currently have around 180,000 paradata records, which can be quite small, such as ‘I like this data’ or ‘I use this data’.

Rehak explained that the Learning Registry is an ‘open everything’ push network which provides a set of APIs enabling developers to build interesting stuff on top. He emphasised that they were keen to see what participants could contribute to or build upon this during the event.

‘We see Learning Registry as an international activity and we're just at the point where we are starting to deploy, so this is a good opportunity for us to connect to people, see what people are doing in the UK and to see how we can leverage and build upon what we have already built.’