An approach to interoperability of ontology-based educational repositories

摘要

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.