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18 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/09/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING
I n the e-learning community, inter-est is growing in reusing learning objects (LOs),1 defined as “any en-
tity, digital or non-digital, that may be
used for learning, education, or train-
ing.” LOs are often described with
standardized metadata using the IEEE
Learning Technology Standards Com-
mittee (LTSC) Learning Object Metadata
(LOM) standard. Users and systems can
use metadata to retrieve LOs in various
innovative ways (faceted search, social
recommendation, and so on) and for
purposes such as attribution and cap-
turing life-cycle or license information.
The Ariadne infrastructure for man-
aging LOs is a distributed network of
repositories that encourages the shar-
ing and reuse of such objects. Ariadne
was initiated in 1996 by the European
Commission’s telematics for educa-
tion and training program. Since then,
an infrastructure has been developed
in Belgium, Switzerland, France, and
Ecuador to produce reusable learning
content, including distributed stor-
age and discovery. Since its launch,
Ariadne’s core software evolved from
a highly coupled to a loosely coupled
style, based on standards for distrib-
uted digital resource management.2
Today, Ariadne supports several do-
main-specific networks, too. Here, we
examine Ariadne’s metadata manage-
ment components and discuss how to
apply them in various networks. We
also look at various architectural pat-
terns that generalize our work.
Reusing digital resources for learning has been a goal for several decades,
driven by potential time savings and quality enhancements. Although the
rapid development of Web-based learning has increased opportunities for
reuse significantly, managing learning objects and making them accessible still
entails many challenges. This article presents and analyzes the standards-based
Ariadne infrastructure for managing learning objects in an open and scalable
architecture. The architecture supports the integration of learning objects in
multiple, distributed repository networks. The authors capture lessons learned
in four architectural patterns.
Stefaan Ternier,
Katrien Verbert,
Gonzalo Parra,
Bram Vandeputte,
Joris Klerkx, and Erik Duval
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Vicente Ordóñez
and Xavier Ochoa
Escuela Superior Politécnica
del Litoral
The Ariadne Infrastructure
for Managing and
Storing Metadata