Abstract.One of the most rapidly evolving e-services is e-Learning, that is, the creation of advanced educational resources that are accessible on-line and, potentially, offer numerous advantages over the traditional ones like intelligent access, interoperability between two or more educational resources and adaptation to the user. The driving force behind these approaches is the definition of the various standards about educational metadata, that is, data describing learning resources, the learner, assessment results, etc. The internal details of systems that utilize these metadata is an open issue since these efforts are primarily dealing with "what" and not "how". Under the light of these emerging efforts, we present CG-PerLS, a knowledge based approach for organizing and accessing educational resources. CG-PerLS is a model of a web portal for learning objects that encodes the educational metadata in the Conceptual Graph knowledge representation formalism, and uses related inference techniques to provide advanced functionality. The model allows learning resource creators to manifest their material and client-side learners to access these resources in a way tailored to their individual profile and educational needs.
IntroductionAs the World Wide Web matures, an initial vision of using it as a universal medium for educational resources is, day by day, becoming reality. There is already a large amount of instructional material on-line, most of it in the form of multimedia HTML documents, some of which are enriched with Java technologies. Unfortunately, most of these approaches have been built on general purpose standards and fail to utilize Web's potential for distributed educational resources that are easily located and interoperate with each other.
202Fotios Kokkoras et al.Information technology assisted education has reached sophisticated levels during 90's, taking into account issues like pedagogy, individual learner and interface, apart from the basic educational material organization. Following the recent "e-" trend, these approaches are just beginning to appear on the internet. The reason for this late adoption is mainly the substantial effort that is required to bring them on the Web since all of them have been designed without the Web in mind.On the other hand, it is commonplace that our society has already moved away from the "once for life" educational model. The complexity and continuous evolution of modern enterprises' activities requires continuous training of their personnel. The networked community enables the management and enhancement of knowledge in a centralized -yet personal way, while keeping track and merging new intellectual resources into that process. The above requirements and advances lead us to the "Lifelong Learning" concept. The idea is to integrate the WWW technology with a novel, dynamic and adaptive educational model for continuous learning. The result will be a learning environment that will enable the individual learner to acquire knowledge just-in-time, anytime and anywhere, ...