Development and Evaluation of National Information Center for Educational Resources

国家教育资源信息中心（NICER）是作为日本所有教育资源的教育门户而开发的。NICER是一个全国性的网站，在这个网站上，教师和学习者都可以轻松地搜索必要的信息。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分布在全国各地的中小学教育相关信息。该系统所采用的分类方法与中小学课程标准的分类方法相一致。因此，特定科目、等级、领域和项目的信息可以很容易地检索到。为了实现LOM教育资源的全球共享，NICER根据IEEE-1484标准开发了LOM系统，以支持国际化。英语中的NICER也是为说英语的人开发的。输入关键词是找到必要信息的方法，但以日语为例，由于书面语中字符类型的多样性，孩子们可能无法达到他们需要的信息，因为他们无法输入尚未学会读写的较难的汉字形式。在上面的例子中，一个孩子可能会在平假名（日语的语音音节表）中输入关键字，但这可能无法被一般的搜索引擎识别，因为搜索引擎只能识别汉字或同一单词的中文字符。我们的系统可以识别两种书写形式的关键词，以支持年轻用户。还为学生和教育工作者开发了许多辅助工具，这些工具通过Internet很好地提供服务。目前网站的年访问量超过300万，这意味着该网站被许多用户使用。

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.