Semantic and pedagogic interoperability mechanisms in the ARIADNE educational repository

Abstract

This paper reports on the principles underlying the semantic and pedagogic interoperability mechanisms built in the European Knowledge Pool System, developed by the European research project ARIADNE. This system, which is the central feature of ARIADNE, consists in a distributed repository of pedagogical documents (or learning objects) of diverse granularity, origin, content, type, language, etc., which are stored in view of their use (and reuse) in telematics-based training or teaching curricula. The learning objects are indexed, usually by faculty staff, according to the ARIADNE metadata set. The principles embodied in the indexation tool, which interacts directly with the repository,stem from a few theoretical ideas but foremost from empirical, pragmatic considerations, suggested by the context of actual use. They tentatively address the stringent demands for semantic and pedagogic interoperability implied by a context of rather wide cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as those stemming from the very nature of the domain application itself: education and training. Possible extensions to the educational metadata scheme developed by ARIADNE on these basis, may accommodate corporate training/information needs. These extensions are briefly discussed as a mean for enhancing 'semantic' interoperability between different (kinds of) corporations. Finally, the architecture of the ARIADNE system, which heavily relies on this educational metadata system, is briefly reviewed.