Development and Evaluation of National Information Center for Educational Resources

国家教育资源信息中心（NICER）是日本所有教育资源的教育门户。NICER是一个全国性的网站，教师和学生都可以很容易地搜索必要的信息。该系统允许用户使用LOM或学习对象元数据以跨网站的方式搜索与全国各地零星分布的小学和中学教育有关的信息。NICER系统中使用的分类与小学和中学教育课程标准中的分类相对应。因此，有关个别科目、年级、范畴及项目的资料，可随时查阅。NICER为了实现教育资源的全球共享，以IEEE-1484为标准开发了LOM系统，以支持国际化。NICER的英文版也是为英语使用者开发的。输入关键字是查找所需信息的方法，但在日语中，由于书面语言中的字符类型多种多样，儿童可能无法获得所需信息，因为他们无法输入尚未学会阅读或书写的较难的汉字形式。在与上述相同的示例中，儿童可以用平假名（日语中的语音音节）输入关键字，但是这在仅识别汉字或相同单词的中文字符的一般搜索引擎中可能无法识别。我们的系统可以识别任何书写形式的关键字，以支持年轻用户。许多支持工具也是为学生和教育工作者开发的，这些工具通过互联网得到了很好的服务。目前网站访问量每年超过300万，这意味着许多用户正在使用NICER。

National Information Center for Educational Resources (NICER) was developed as the Educational gateway to all educational resources in Japan. NICER is the national website in which both instructors and learners are able to search necessary information easily. The system allows users to search for information related to primary and secondary education that reside sporadically across the country in a cross-website manner using LOM or Learning Object Metadata. The categorization used in NICER's system corresponds to that of the Curriculum Standards for elementary and high school education. Therefore information for particular subjects, grades, areas and items can be retrieved readily. In order to allow global sharing of educational resources using LOM, NICER has developed the LOM system with the IEEE-1484 standard in mind, to support the internationalization. NICER in English was also developed for English speakers.Entering keywords is the method to find necessary information, but in the case of Japanese, because of the multiplicity of types of characters in the written language, children may not be able to reach the information they need, because they cannot enter the more difficult forms of Chinese characters they have not yet learned to read or write. In the same example as above, a child may enter the keyword in hiragana, the phonetic syllabary in Japanese, but this may not be recognized in general search engines which only identify with kanji, or Chinese characters of the same word. Our system can recognize keywords in either forms of writing, to support young users.The many supporting tools were also developed for students and educators, and these are well in service through the Internet. The current website accesses are exceed three million per year, which means this NICER are using by many users.