Ontology-based Metadata Integration Approach for Learning Resource Interoperability

Owing to the increasing demand of learning resource sharing, data integration is a promising approach to support system interoperability across heterogeneous e-Learning systems. One of the main problems to deal with in data heterogeneity is semantic conflict and although a variety of methodologies have been proposed which focus on name conflicts, structure conflicts have received little attention. This paper proposes an approach of ontology-based metadata integration for sharing learning resources between the heterogeneous Learning Management Systems. In order to achieve semantic interoperability, the standard metadata DC/LOM, WordNet and mapping rules are proposed to cope with not only name conflict but also structure conflict arising in the real-world system. The preliminary result provides the ability of learning resource interoperability between the different repositories that can establish a community-shared and reusable semantic pattern base over educational institutes.