Building distributed collaborative learning environments with software agents and XML

摘要

This paper describes a design and implementation of a distributed collaborative learning environment that supports various multimedia documents. Publishers and subscribed readers can share these documents over the Internet. The documents can be rendered in various required formats, for example HTML. The implementation is based on mobile software agents and XML. The use of mobile agents makes it possible to support both connected and disconnected operations. In addition, agents allow for searching, browsing and distributed maintenance of documents using both a "push" model of information sharing, as well as the more traditional "pull" model. All documents are stored in a standardized XML format. Our research is innovative in that it proposes merging mobile agent and XML technologies for such applications.