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The SCAM web is going through a major revision right now. This decription only covers version 2 of SCAM

About SCAM...

SCAM (Standardized Contextualized Access to Metadata)
Descriptive information about resources (e.g. metadata) is a general problem when managing digital resources. The problem will get more and more complex as the number of resources grows. Metadata must be able to exist on several levels for a resource. Raging from simple, bibliographic metadata to advanced descriptions that carry semantics and expresses relations between and within digital resources. A sophisticated use of digital resources requires sophisticated metadata management!

The construction of advanced metadata systems that handles semantics and that are coherent to open standards requires specialist competence in several areas as well as a quite extensive system development effort. In other words – it tends to get complicated and expensive…

The purpose of the SCAM projects is to implement some core functionality for building systems (such as repositories, archives and web sites) that uses semantic web technology (RDF) and open standards. SCAM can be seen as a development framework for such systems.

Several systems and application have been built on SCAM one is the fully functional SCAM Learning Portfolio that is distributed with the SCAM Light distribution. The SCAM Learning Portfolio can, for example be used by teachers that wants to work with portfolio methodology. To see more examples of SCAM-based applications, have a look at the SCAM projects page.

Software environment
SCAM is developed using Enterprise Java, and JBoss. SCAM is distributed with the HyperSonic database (SCAM Light) and PostGreSQL (SCAM Full). SCAM uses RDF as a basis for all metadata, but does also support other metadata models through mapping. For example IMS/LOM Metadata, IMS Content Packaging and Dublin Core. Other metadata models can be added when needed. The current release (October 2003) is version 2.0.

License
It is Open Source and licensed under a combined GPL/MPL and LGPL license.

The consortium
The SCAM project was started in 2001 by the Swedish National Agency for Education together with the KMR-group at CID at the Royal Institute for Technology (KTH). Other interested parties where Uppsala/Swedish Learning Lab, Utbildningsradion (UR) and Swedish Center for Flexible Learning (CFL), Umeå University - IML, and Uppsala University (ILU).

Last modified 2004-05-10 by Fredrik Paulsson