Functional Semantics Aware Broker Based Architecture for E-learning Web Services

E-learning enables the learner to gain diverse knowledge anytime, anywhere and on any device. Learning resources (objects) and resource providers play a very important role in e-learning applications/systems. The increasing demand for interoperability in existing heterogeneous e-learning systems to support accessibility and reusability is the most challenging research issue. Web services and SOA enables interoperability between heterogeneous applications over the Web. To adopt Web services technology towards the reusability and aggregation of e-learning services, the conceptual Web services architecture and its building blocks need to be augmented. In this paper, a well formed functional semantics approach is proposed to describe e-learning Web services providing variety of learning objects/resources. The paper presents an extendible functional knowledge to map the learner’s or provider’s versions of service descriptions into a standard form called Abstract Description. The authors propose a broker based elearning Web service architecture which facilitates effective e-learning service publishing and discovery mechanisms. The paper explores a scheme to extend the WSDL 2.0 document in order to incorporate functional semantics of e-learning Web services and their operations. The paper presents an e-learning service knowledge called Learning Operation Tree (LOT) for the quick e-learning service discovery. The experimentation shows that, the proposed broker based architecture for e-learning Web services facilitates effective discovery with moderate performance in terms of recall and response.