Title: An approach to interoperability of ontology-based educational repositories

Authors: Darina Dicheva, Lora Aroyo

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Winston-Salem State University, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Winston Salem, NC 27110, USA. ' Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 315, 5600 MD Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Abstract: Web-based educational repositories aim at providing the learner with immediate, online access to a broad range of structured information and contextualised help to support efficient educational task performance. A significant effort is currently focused on bringing such systems to work together to provide better support within the context of web-based education. Our goal is to approach the problem from a rather practical perspective and propose a framework for supporting communication between existing ontology-based educational repositories to better utilise their resources. The framework allows two independent systems to share and interchange information solely through ontology-based communication without direct access to each other data stores. As a basis of the framework we define a communication ontology and propose a Concept-Based EIS Interaction Protocol (CBEIS IP) built over SAAJ-enabled Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) transport layer. We show how through communication protocols, we can realise a general modular architecture comprising components that can be shared and interchanged.

Keywords: interoperability; educational information systems; web-based education; ontologies; metadata; educational repositories; semantic web; e-learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2006.008920

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2006 Vol.16 No.1/2, pp.92 - 109

Published online: 03 Feb 2006 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article