Exploring the Provenance and Accuracy as Metadata Quality Metrics in Assessment Resources of OCW Repositories

Open Education is a movement that was born with the purpose of bringing knowledge to disadvantaged sectors and opening the doors to better education opportunities for all. Open Educational Resources (OER) such as Open CourseWare (OCW) has become support resources in the educational environment. For this reason, the quality of the repositories is highlighted by the quality of their metadata. The metadata is one characteristic of the repositories, that facilitates the search and discovery tasks of educational resources, in this way ensures their reuse. Consequently, to assure universal access to quality knowledge there are some metrics of metadata quality to evaluate OCW repository metadata: completeness, consistency, coherence, accuracy, provenance, and accessibility. In this study, accuracy and provenance are prioritized as quality metrics for metadata quality evaluation because they support potential users in the search and selection of OCW resources. This paper uses a set of data from the repository of semantic search engine Serendipity in order to evaluate the selected quality metadata metrics, applying cosine distance technique and calculation of completeness of provenance metadata because it is an important aspect of validating quality criteria for ICT tools. When the corresponding values of the study metrics are obtained, the analysis of the obtained results is performed. Two important findings are identified. First, the cosine technique is an important tool to find the semantic distance between the resource and its metadata. Second, the PAV ontology provides provenance properties of an OCW that helps in obtaining the provenance quality of a resource. This paper is limited to the dataset available in Serendipity semantic search engine, however, it is considered that the interpretation of the findings does not vary if we use a specific repository.