Glossary
- CNXML
- CNXML is an XML specification for writing modules. The goal of creating CNXML was to have a language that dealt with the content of the material rather than the details of presentation.
- Content Commons
- The Content Commons is where modules and collections/courses are stored.
- Collection/Course
- A collection (often referred to as a course) is a group of modules arranged in a specific order and labeled by the author, editor or instructor building the collection. A collection can be a course, textbook, report, survey, journal, etc. In each module, the collection builder can add links to supplemental, prerequisite, or example material to help learners understand the material.
- Metadata
- Metadata are non-content information included within a module or a collection. Module metadata include the module ID, license type, version number, creation date, revision date, authors, maintainers, copyright holders, module name, keywords, and abstract. Collection metadata include the collection title, the author's institution, an associated course code if applicable, an instructor if applicable, a home page URL, keywords, and abstract.
- Module
- A module is the basic building block of a course, textbook, or other type of collection. You can think of it as a small knowledge chunk that contains text and images that address a single topic or a specific aspect of a topic. The author determines the size of a module. To a learner or reader viewing a course or collection, a module is simply a web page in the collection. Modules allow readers to follow the information path arranged by the author or instructor or to branch off and discover their own path. To an instructor putting a course together, having topics in different modules allows easy selection and arrangement of the information. An instructor can include existing modules from other courses or other academic disciplines that are important to the presentation of the course subject.
- Namespace (XML)
- Different XML applications or languages may use the same tags to mean different things. If you use multiple XML-based languages within the same document this may cause confusion. To prevent this, each XML-based language defines a namespace that distinguishes its tags from the tags of other languages.
- QML
- QML (Questions Markup Language) is an XML-based language for describing learning assessment items (questions). It was originally developed so that collections could present interactive questions to students.
- Stylesheet
- A stylesheet is a separate document from the CNXML file. The stylesheet defines how the document is displayed. There are two stylesheet languages: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language). CSS defines how a tag is displayed. XSL is a transformation and formatting language that allows you to convert an XML document into another type of document, for example, convert a CNXML document into HTML or LaTeX.
- XML
- XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a set of rules for defining markup languages that define, validate, and share document formats. A markup language is any language (such as HTML) that uses tags surrounding text to convey information such as content or format.