A collaborative environment for e-training in archaeology

Abstract

This paper describes CREST (Collaborative Environment for Students and Teachers) a novel integrated environment for collaborative content retrieve and annotation and e-training in the field of Archaeology that is used by teaching stuff and students, as well. CREST is used in a broad range of collaborative applications and enables multi-authoring, using information in educational interactions by indicating information source, maintaining information, structuring information, adding meta-information, and sharing information among participants. An ontology enabled annotation and knowledge management environment was developed and endowed with collaborative information searching agents. Two agents were implemented in order to search and download aggregated metadata and text documents from the Web and to store information into a documents corpus repository. The corpus repository is further accessed by users through the annotator interface. This original approach is based on open standards and integrates open source services that improve discovery and reasoning across domain specific collections. CREST allows users to create, edit, store, and retrieve objects and annotations, promotes development and re-use of meaningful content. Such environment has a great utility for the development of virtual learning and research spaces.