An Ontological Service Oriented and Web Searching Mechanism in Distributed e-learning Repositories

The great heterogeneity of Web based learning systems storing and providing digital e-learning data requires the introduction of interoperability aspects in order to resolve integration problems in a flexible and dynamic way. Learning objects developed and stored in many different places on the Web have a tremendous potential to benefit e-learning in particular and education in general. So the distributed e-learning data integration is significant for the enforcement of novel searching mechanisms in distributed e-learning repositories. Our approach introduces an advanced search mechanism which initializes a semantic model representing the digital content stored in distributed e-learning servers, through the use of ontologies. In order to retrieve useful content to be added to the learning environment while bypassing compatibility problems between different ontological representations of the same domain, we use a mixed approach constituting both keywords and ontologies. Searching tasks are carried out in the metadata level, where information concerning Web digital content is published, managed and stored in the form of a scalable description of knowledge domains