A Virtual Knowledge Market-Place

Networked multimedia presently revolutionises teaching as once did the invention of blackboard and chalk. Distribution and roll out of complex multimedia objects however suffers from significant efforts any author has to fulfil in production. This paper presents a prototypic implementation of a virtual marketplace for multimedia teaching objects, which by a simple user policy allows for trading knowledge material between teachers. Knowledge entities thereby are considered as adaptable, compound objects consisting of media data as well as annotations, background information and meta descriptors. Our Knowledge Marketplace is based on the more general Multimedia Information Repository MIR. The MIR system consists of an intelligent media database with Web-authoring tool and is based on a hypermedia data model of reusable object components. Further educational applications of our architecture are presented, as well.