An Extensible Framework for Building Interactive Courses on Web

The World-Wide Web, the world's largest hypertext structure, has already in the last ten years a huge development. Recently, many worldwide consistent or semi-consistent collections of scientific data, in specific disciplines, have become accessible on Internet. These sources of information comply with a standard for interoperability. In this paper we propose an extensible framework based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) family for building interactive courses on Web. This framework consists in several parts used for distributed storage of hypermedia, for synchronized multimedia presentations, and for authorization of users (professors and students) to access data. Therefore, increased usage of online courses by non-specialists has increased the need for a more effective and friendlier user-interface experience. One solution of these problems is the use of extensible and adaptable standardized methodologies and languages for annotation of hypermedia information on Web, such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), RDF (Resource Description Framework) or SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). Our proposed framework is platform independent and can be easily implemented on any operating system.