Polyxeni Arapi

ASIDE: An Architecture for Supporting Interoperability between Digital Libraries and ELearning Applications

eLearning applications are immensely more valuable when they can use the wealth of information that exists in multimedia digital libraries. However, digital libraries and their standards developed independently on eLearning applications and their standards. It is crucial to bridge the interoperability gap between digital libraries and eLearning applications in order to enable the construction of eLearning applications that easily exploit digital library contents. We present ASIDE, an integrated architecture that supports interoperability between digital libraries and eLearning applications. The architecture is service oriented and supports multiple contexts and views of the digital objects of a library. These views can be utilized by eLearning applications of the digital library for the automatic construction of personalized learning experiences selecting learning objects from the reusable objects of the digital library.

Supporting interoperability in an existing e-learning platform using SCORM

The proliferation of interoperability e-learning specifications raises the need of extending existing e-learning platforms so that they can be used efficiently in a distributed environment where material producers, service providers and users (either learners or teachers) exchange information using standard models. This extension is essential to preserve digital learning material and retain the user groups and learning communities already set up. We present a generic architecture and its prototype implementation for addressing this need. This architecture is based on the two assumptions that: (1) the preexistent e-learning platform is implemented on top of a relational database management system, and (2) the interoperability model to be supported is SCORM. The prototype implementation uses a Web-based e-learning platform based on a solid pedagogical framework.

Metadata Management and Sharing in Multimedia Open Learning Environment (MOLE)

This paper presents a framework and an architecture for learning resource management and sharing aiming at facilitating the implementation of such functionality on top of existing Learning Management Systems. It also presents the implementation of this framework and its integration with the MOLE (Multimedia Open Learning Environment – http://www.moleportal.eu/) system. Main components of this architecture are: (a) the LOM Editor, an intuitive web based tool that is able to accommodate different Application Profiles, while getting adapted accordingly; (b) The LOM Repository that stores the metadata generated by the LOM Editor and implements the common repository services (search/expose, submit/store, request/deliver) for the management of metadata records; (c) the user interfaces that exploit those services to expose the metadata management functionality to end-users; and (d) an OAI-PMH interface that allows for harvesting of the repository metadata from large repositories/federations (e.g. ARIADNE, Organic.Edunet etc.) on top of the repository.

Metadata Management and Interoperability Support for Natural History Museums

Natural History Museums (NHMs) are a rich source of knowledge about Earth’s biodiversity and natural history. However, an impressive abundance of high quality scientific content available in NHMs around Europe remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as: the lack of interconnection and interoperability between the management systems used by museums, the lack of centralized access through a European point of reference like Europeana, and the inadequacy of the current metadata and content organization. The Natural Europe project offers a coordinated solution at European level that aims to overcome those barriers. This paper presents the architecture, deployment and evaluation of the Natural Europe infrastructure allowing the curators to publish, semantically describe and manage the museums’ Cultural Heritage Objects, as well as disseminate them to Europeana.eu and biodiversity networks like BioCASE and GBIF.

A Pedagogy-driven Personalization Framework to Support Adaptive Learning Experiences

The creation of personalized learning experiences is considered as a necessity to cope with the overwhelming amount of available learning material. This paper presents a personalization framework and an algorithm that allows for the creation of pedagogically sound learning experiences taking into account the variety of the learners and their individual needs.

Federating Natural History Museums in Natural Europe

An impressive abundance of high quality scientific content about Earth’s biodiversity and natural history available in Natural History Museums (NHMs) around Europe remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as: the lack of interconnection and interoperability between the management systems used by museums, the lack of centralized access through a European point of reference like Europeana, and the inadequacy of the current metadata and content organization. To cope with these problems, the Natural Europe project offers a coordinated solution at European level. Cultural heritage content is collected from six Natural History Museums around Europe into a federation of European Natural History Digital Libraries that is directly connected with Europeana.eu. This paper presents the Natural Europe Cultural Digital Libraries Federation infrastructure consisting of: (a) The Natural Europe Cultural Environment (NECE), i.e. the infrastructure and toolset deployed on each NHM allowing their curators to publish, semantically describe, manage and disseminate the Cultural Heritage Objects (CHOs) they contribute to the project, and (b) the Natural Europe Cultural Heritage Infrastructure (NECHI) interconnecting NHM digital libraries and further exposing their metadata records to Europeana.eu.

Metadata management, interoperability and Linked Data publishing support for Natural History Museums

Natural history museums (NHMs) form a rich source of knowledge about Earth’s biodiversity and natural history. However, an impressive abundance of high-quality scientific content available in NHMs around Europe remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as the lack of interconnection and interoperability between the management systems used by museums, the lack of centralized access through a European point of reference such as Europeana and the inadequacy of the current metadata and content organization. The Natural Europe project offers a coordinated solution at European level that aims to overcome those barriers. In this article, we present the architecture, deployment and evaluation of the Natural Europe infrastructure allowing the curators to publish, semantically describe and manage the museums’ cultural heritage objects, as well as disseminate them to Europeana.eu and BioCASE/GBIF. Additionally, we discuss the methodology followed for the transition of the infrastructure to the Semantic Web and the publishing of NHMs’ cultural heritage metadata as Linked Data, supporting the Europeana Data Model.

COLearn and open discovery space portal alignment: A case of enriching open learning infrastructures with collaborative learning capabilities

In this paper we present COLearn platform which can be seen as a shell, easily integrated on top of existing open learning infrastructures (such as LMSs and OER repositories) to enrich their capabilities by offering functionality to design rich learning activities and learning workflows. COLearn run-time environment is used to enact these activities and workflows. This way, COLearn leverages the power of the underlying infrastructures, provides structure to the groups of learners that participate in learning workflows, dynamically adapts the workflows during their enactment, monitors their evolution to facilitate assessment and provides feedback to the learners. COLearn employs an intuitive graphical representation exploiting the BPMN standard. As an internal representation and interoperability model it uses IMS LD thus offering effective sharing and remixing to realize the vision of open educational practices. This is an important aspect as it makes explicit the, otherwise tacit knowledge pertaining to the design of learning experiences.

A framework and an architecture for supporting interoperability between digital libraries and eLearning applications

One of the most important applications of Digital Libraries (DL) is learning. In order to enable the development of eLearning applications that easily exploit DL contents it is crucial to bridge the interoperability gap between DL and eLearning applications. For this purpose, a generic interoperability framework has been developed that could also be applied to other types of applications which are built on top of DL, although this paper focuses on eLearning applications. In this context, a framework for supporting pedagogy-driven personalization in eLearning applications has been developed that performs automatic creation of personalized learning experiences using reusable (audiovisual) learning objects, taking into account the learner profiles and a set of abstract training scenarios (pedagogical templates). From a technical point of view, all the framework components have been organized into a service-oriented Architecture that Supports Interoperability between Digital Libraries and ELearning Applications (ASIDE). A prototype of the ASIDE Framework has been implemented.