Virtual Collaborative Learning Communities: from Metadata to Semantics

Abstract

This paper presents a system, which allows collaborative learning communities to share and to work around a common body of knowledge through a Learning Object Repository (LOR, for short. The LOR stores any results and by-products generated throughout the learning process by using a number of different tools.) There is a virtual learning community, which provides a workspace where users can collaborate to carry out group activities. An interaction infrastructure supports these activities by offering a set of services such as shared workspaces, chat rooms or discussion forums. Students elaborate by-products, which are then stored as learning objects. These, in turn, articulate collaboration by means of successive changes along instructional activities. LOs are stored along with automatically extracted or elicited meta-information coming either from the context or from the tools that have been used to handle these LO's. Metadata are then added, by means of an abstraction process, to an ontology, which facilitates reasoning about each element within the system, particularly, about the available contextual information. Furthermore, the ontology provides complex semantic searching. © AEPIA.