Integrated Access to Learning Objects Repositories and Digital Libraries

摘要

Nowadays, Digital Libraries (DLs) are important information resources and have been used to support education. As e-learning has gained attention with the development of the Information and Communication Technologies, DLs are being considered as great enablers of good e-learning environments. However, although DLs and e-learning systems have some common services, they also have some different characteristics and deal with different types of documents. Usually DLs deal with bigger documents while e-learning systems use documents that are developed according to object oriented principles aiming at providing content reuse. Therefore, e-learning systems usually deal with documents called Learning Objects (LOs). Besides the differences on the documents, the metadata structures that are used to describe these documents are also different, which makes an open problem their search and retrieval in an integrated way. In this paper we describe a general architecture for providing integrated access to distributed and heterogeneous LO repositories and DLs. This architecture is based on information integration techniques: mediators and wrappers. A prototype has been developed considering the integration of metadata for LOs with DL metadata and it has been implemented through web-services and ontologies, which provide more flexibility on the implementation of the integration components while supporting semantic treatment through a more formal representation.