Interoperability in Adaptive eLearning Web Applications

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Interoperability in Adaptive eLearning Web
Applications

• A Standards-Based Approach

Eddie Walsh Knowledge and Data Engineering
Group Trinity College Dublin Supervisor Vincent
Wade walshe8_at_cs.tcd.ie 22nd May 2008
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Overview

• Research Motivation
• IMS Tools Interoperability
• FUMES
• Research Progress

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Research Motivation

• Interoperability between elearning systems
• becoming easier
• xml and web services
• IMS Tools Interoperability (IMS TI)
• Interoperability between adaptive elearning
  systems
• more complex
• provides personalisation based on the user model
• preferences, competencies
• different systems have different types
• standardised IMS LIP, IEEE PAPI
• custom xml databases
• difficult to exchange between them

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Research Motivation

• General Interoperability Issues
• Syntactic heterogeneity
• different interfaces
• different data models
• Semantic heterogeneity
• different vocabularies and different perspectives
  on the data
• different terms used to describe similar concepts
  e.g. 'Author', 'Creator', and 'Composer'
• identical terms used that mean very different
  things
• introduces confusion and error

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Research Motivation
This research investigates the issues of
syntactic and semantic user interoperability in
heterogeneous elearning systems
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IMS Tools Interoperability

• IMS TI enables applications to be built which
  allow functionality sharing
• learning applications are integrated into a
  system as easily as an RSS feed
• can be used in a wide range of Learning
  Management Systems (LMS)
• set of simple standardized web services which
  exchange information between a LMS and an
  external application
• externally hosted application appears seamlessly
  in the LMS

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IMS Tools Interoperability
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IMS Tools Interoperability
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FUMES

• Federated User Model Exchange Services
• FUMES is a tool to exchange user model
  information between two systems using web
  services
• Works at the syntactic and semantic level using
  ontologies
• An ontology is a description of concepts and
  their relationships in a domain
• FUMES combined with IMS TI provides user model
  and functionality integration of heterogeneous
  elearning tools

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FUMES IMS TI
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FUMES IMS TI
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FUMES Architecture
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Research Progress

• Completed
• LMS (Sakai) adaptive tool (ASPIRE)
• both IMS TI compliant
• first version of FUMES
• provides basic exchange of user events between
  Sakai and ASPIRE using web services
• Current
• second version of FUMES
• semantic interoperability
• IMS LIP ontology user interface
• Future
• evaluation

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Questions?
Eddie Walsh Knowledge and Data Engineering
Group Trinity College Dublin Supervisor Vincent
Wade walshe8_at_cs.tcd.ie 22nd May 2008