A Standardized Metadata Set for Annotation of Virtual and Remote Laboratories

Online Laboratories and Virtual Experiments start to play an increasingly important role in the education of Engineering and Science Education. While several repositories for online and virtual experiments are available, a common method for annotating experiments to simplify their discovery is not yet available and accepted. In 2010, an international group of online lab providers formed the Global Online Lab Consortium (GOLC) to address the issues of interoperability between online laboratories and laboratory compilations, one of its activities is the establishment of an ontology and a common metadata set that addresses not only the needs of typical lab providers and lab users, but also of storage and archival institutions such as libraries. This article describes the current status of the GOLC activities in the metadata subcommittee, lists the requirements of various user groups of the metadata set and provides insight into both the underlying ontology and the metadata specifications themselves.