Retrieving Content with Agents in Web Service E-learning Systems

In recent years, e-learning started to attract a lot of attention from researchers as well as practitioners. Many of the existing architectures of e-learning systems are mainly based on plain client-server or peer-topeer architectures and are therefore suffering from drawbacks like poor scalability or complicated interchange of content. In this paper, we present a distributed, service-oriented architecture for e-learning systems based on Web services, and describe the extensions to support software agents. Moreover, we show what advantages such an architecture may have to offer and propose the usage of intelligent software agents for the distributed retrieval of educational content.