An Intelligent Educational Metadata Repository

N. Bassiliades, F. Kokkoras, I. Vlahavas, D. Sampson, “An Intelligent Educational Metadata Repository”, Intelligent Systems, Techniques and Applications, C.T. Leondes (Ed.), CRC Press, Vol. 4, Ch.12, pp. 297-337, 2003.

Recently, several standardization efforts for e-learning technologies gave rise to various specifications for educational metadata, that is, data describing all the “entities” involved in an educational procedure. The internal details of systems that utilize these metadata are still an open issue since these efforts are primarily dealing with “what” and not “how”. In this chapter, under the light of these emerging standardization efforts, we present X-DEVICE, an intelligent XML repository system for educational metadata. X-DEVICE can be used as the intelligent back-end of a WWW portal on which “learning objects” are supplied by educational service providers and accessed by learners according to their individual profiles and educational needs. X-DEVICE transforms the widely adopted XML binding for educational metadata into a flexible, object-oriented representation and uses intelligent second-order logic querying facilities to provide advanced, personalized functionality. Furthermore, a case study is presented, in which learning object metadata and learner’s profile metadata are combined under certain X-DEVICE rules in order to dynamically infer customized courses for the learner.