KMi Seminars
Supporting Context-Awareness and Standards Interoperability in e-Learning
This event took place on Wednesday 14 March 2007 at 11:30

 
Alessio Gugliotta KMi, The Open University

Current technologies aimed at supporting learning goals primarily follow a data and metadata-centric paradigm aimed at providing the learner with appropriate learning content packages containing the learning process description as well as the learning resources. Whereas process metadata is usually based on a specific standard specification? like ADL SCORM or the IMS Learning Design standard ? the used learning data is specific to specific learning contexts. The allocation of learning resources ? data or services - usually is done manually at design-time of a content package. Therefore, a content package cannot consider the actual learning context since this is only known at runtime of a package respectively the learning process. These facts limit the reusability of a specific content package across different standards and contexts. To overcome these issues, this paper describes an innovative semantic web service-based approach aimed at changing this data- and metadata-based paradigm to a context-adaptive service-oriented approach following the idea of a dynamic allocation of data and services at runtime of a specific learning process. This approach enables a dynamic adaptation to specific learner needs and objectives and supports the development of abstract semantic process models which are re-usable across different contexts and metadata standards. To illustrate the application of our approach and to prove its feasibility, a prototypical application based on an initial use case scenario is provided.

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KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities