UNIVERSAL - design and implementation of a highly flexible e-market-place for learning

The paper illustrates the design and implementation of a highly flexible, electronic market-place for learning resources called UNIVERSAL. Integrating learning resource related data in a (semi-)automated way demands a flexible data model. The paper elaborates on components of an educational market-place model such as learning resources, agents, rights and delivery systems. The central data formats of UNIVERSAL are based on RDF. We argue that the flexibility of RDF provides a high level of adaptability to future changes in the data model and a maximum level of openness. UNIVERSAL aims at contributing to the idea of a semantic Web of universities, pursuing the vision of having data on the Web defined and linked in such a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications