ELeGI

European Learning Grid Infrastructure

http://www.elegi.org/

Research

The objective of the project is to advance the effective use of technology-enhanced learning in Europe through the creation of a distributed and pervasive environment based on Grid technology for effective human learning where learning is a social activity consumed in communications and collaborations based dynamic Virtual Communities and the learners, through direct experiences, create and share their knowledge in a contextualised and personalised way.

The main research topics in the domain of workflows regard the investigation of the semantic technologies and in particular how concretely integrate the semantic aspects in the Grid based ELeGI software architecture to define an automatic service discovery and composition process and an High Level Language that, on the basis of the defined process, is suitable to define and coordinate a learning activity taking in account also pedagogical models.

In particular, the research topics about this specific TG are:

• The Automatic Services Discovery and Composition process: we will investigate how semantic technologies can be used in order to fill the lacks of current discovery mechanism and orchestration and choreography languages (e.g. BPEL4WS and WS-Choreography) that require an a priori knowledge about i) the services to discover and/or compose and ii) on the services needed to create a composed service. A strong semantic integration is needed in order to create an automatic service composition process able not only to discovery and select the right contents and services but also to propose different combination on the basis of educational and learners’ preferences and knowledge.
• The definition of a High Level Language suitable to define and coordinate the flow of a learning activity. Even in this case, the state of art in terms of workflow languages is not suitable for two reasons:
• The lack of language constructs for the definition of GUI environments allowing the user to interact with the composed service or with its single components.
• The lack of constructs allowing to directly considering the abstraction “content”.