• Integration of ML techniques into DigiMoCA, a T-MoCA-based conversational agent. • Models yielded an R 2 of 0.81 and RMSE of 1.84 in predictive validity. • MCI detection showed an AUC of 0.98, with 100% sensitivity and 93% specificity. • DigiMoCA offers a self-administered, accessible, and cost-effective alternative. • The integration of ML techniques significantly outperforms previous related work. Background: This study investigates the feasibility of integrating machine learning techniques into DigiMoCA, a T-MoCA-based conversational agent for the early screening of cognitive impairment in senior adults. Method: A sample of 46 participants with varying cognitive decline levels, age, and gender was recruited. Each participant undertook several gold standard tests as well as two administrations of DigiMoCA. Then, a data processing architecture was designed and implemented to test different Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Results: Predictive validity testing using the Telephone Montreal Cognitive Assessment (T-MoCA) yielded promising results, with the best-performing algorithm achieving an R 2 = 0.81 and RMSE of 1.84. Criterion validity testing for discerning between individuals suffering from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and non-MCI individuals showed an area under the ROC curve of 0.98 in the best case, with 100% sensitivity and 93% specificity. Thus, the inclusion of machine learning allows to exploit more effectively the information captured with DigiMoCA, improving its MCI screening potential. Conclusions: Integrating machine learning techniques into DigiMoCA showed promising predictive and criterion validity, indicating the efficacy of the approach in discerning cognitive decline levels and facilitating timely interventions for individuals at risk of cognitive decline. Despite limitations in sample size and heterogeneity, the findings notably outperform previous related work, laying a foundation for future research and showcasing the potential of conversational agents for this purpose.

The limitations of current cognitive impairment screening instruments, combined with the widespread adoption of smart speakers, highlight the need for an easy-to-use and accessible cognitive assessment tool. This study introduces DigiMoCA, a conversational agent for the detection of cognitive impairment, and presents its diagnostic, convergent and content validity. DigiMoCA was tested with 46 senior adults, and standard statistical analysis was utilized to determine its validity. We used T-MoCA as the gold standard. In the best scenario, we obtained a Pearson correlation of r=0.88 with the gold standard, and an area under the ROC curve of AUC=0.79 for the detection of cognitive impairment. Additionally, linear regression was applied to predict the gold standard outcomes from DigiMoCA’s, obtaining a coefficient of determination R2=0.77. This demonstrates the potential of DigiMoCA as a digital screening tool for the early detection of cognitive impairment among senior adults.

ABSTRACT Introduction The popularization of blockchain‐based applications made evident a critical challenge, namely the inherent isolation of these decentralized systems, akin to the disconnected and technologically diverse local area networks of the 1970s. This lack of interoperability limits the potential for widespread adoption and innovation in the blockchain space. While various initiatives aim to bridge this gap, many remain nascent. Methods This article addresses this issue by proposing a robust architecture and practical implementation to interconnect two Ethereum‐based blockchains, enabling seamless smart contract interactions across these chains, and facilitating the exchange of complex information beyond mere token transfers. Results Our work explores the emerging landscape of inter‐blockchain communication, highlighting their current maturity and potential, and providing insights on how to overcome the technical hurdles associated with these protocols, particularly in the context of transmitting complex data and executing cross‐chain function calls. Additionally, we illustrate with a case study the challenges posed by linking private blockchains with public ones, ensuring secure and efficient data exchange. Conclusion This article aims to inspire blockchain researchers and practitioners, presenting a foundational framework for enhancing blockchain interoperability, including detailed, practical steps for its implementation. By laying the groundwork for more connected blockchain ecosystems, we intend to support the continued evolution and widespread adoption of blockchain technology.

Abstract Background: early detection of dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) have an utmost significance nowadays, and smart conversational agents are becoming more and more capable. DigiMoCA, an Alexa-based voice application for the screening of MCI, was developed and tested. Objective: to evaluate the acceptability and usability of DigiMoCA, considering the perception of end-users and cognitive assessment administrators, through standard evaluation questionnaires. Method: a sample of 46 individuals and 24 evaluators participated in this study. End-users were fairly heterogeneous considering demographic and neuro-psychological characteristics. Evaluators were mostly health and social care professionals, relatively well-balanced in terms of gender, career background and years of experience. Results: end-users acceptability ratings were generally positive (rating above 3 in a 5-point scale for all dimensions) and it improved significantly after the interaction with DigiMoCA. Administrators also rated the usability of DigiMoCA, with an average score of 5.86/7 and with high internal consistency ( $$\alpha $$ α = 0.95). Conclusion: although there is still room for improvement in terms of user satisfaction and voice interface, DigiMoCA is perceived as an acceptable, accessible and usable cognitive screening tool, both by individuals being tested and test administrators. Graphical abstract

Abstract Smart assistants are among the most popular technological devices at home. With a built‐in voice‐based user interface, they provide access to a broad portfolio of online services and information, and constitute the central element of state‐of‐the‐art home automation systems. This work discusses the challenges addressed and the solutions adopted for the design and implementation of scripted conversations by means of off‐the‐shelf smart assistants. Scripted conversations play a fundamental role in many application fields, such as call center facilities, retail customer services, rapid prototyping, role‐based training or the management of neuropsychiatric disorders. To illustrate this proposal, an actual implementation of the phone version of the Montreal cognitive assessment test as an Amazon's Alexa skill is described as a proof‐of‐concept.

Blockchain technologies are attracting the interest of different actors in various sectors and, among them, the education field, which is also studying how to apply these technologies to improve the traceability, accountability, and integrity of its information. Although different initiatives and projects were launched and are being developed, there are still issues not fully resolved, such as privacy, compliance with data protection regulations and scalability. This research proposes a novel design of a system to issue, store and verify different types of academic information, which allows complying with applicable regulations, protecting the privacy of users' personal data, as well as addressing the problem of scalability and performance.

OBJECTIVE: To design, implement, and test a solution to provide social and health services for the elderly at home based on smart TV technologies and access to all services. METHODS: The architecture proposed is based on an open software platform and standard personal computing hardware. This provides great flexibility to develop new applications over the underlying infrastructure or to integrate new devices, for instance to monitor a broad range of vital signs in those cases where home monitoring is required. RESULTS: An actual system as a proof-of-concept was designed, implemented, and deployed. Applications range from social network clients to vital signs monitoring; from interactive TV contests to conventional online care applications such as medication reminders or telemedicine. CONCLUSION: In both cases, the results have been very positive, confirming the initial perception of the TV as a convenient, easy-to-use technology to provide social and health care. The TV set is a much more familiar computing interface for most senior users, and as a consequence, smart TVs become a most convenient solution for the design and implementation of applications and services targeted to this user group. SIGNIFICANCE: This proposal has been tested in real setting with 62 senior people at their homes. Users included both individuals with experience using computers and others reluctant to them.

Nowadays, there are a lot of online repositories containing thousands of very useful educational resources for the educational community. To take full advantage of these resources requires a simple, direct and effective access to those resources that are of interest, therefore, it is necessary that those resources are ordered or ranked based on some criteria? -- that is to say, they have to be classified. Classification is usually done manually by the resource provider, which directly implies a main problem: the time spent categorising resources. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem through the design and implementation of a multi-label classifier that enables the automatic classification of a set of educational resources in their most suitable category or categories, thus eliminating the need to manually perform this classification. Evaluation results show that the performance of the OER classifier is comparable to classification of a de-facto standard corpus: OHSUMED.

Open educational resources are a key instrument in the promotion of learning and social appropriation of knowledge in the digital world. Providing access to existing learning resources in a way that teachers, students and parents are able to discover, acquire, discuss and adapt them to their own learning scenarios will also promote the development of values and attitudes that play a fundamental role in the educational process, such as team work, collaboration and critical thinking. In turn, this will foster the development of learning networks and communities. In this context, teachers play an instrumental role as facilitators, as their expertise enables them to assess the quality of content and to design and adapt learning activities according to individual learners' profiles. However, we wanted to find out how the interaction with open educational resources would enhance teachers' activities, if digital resources could be easily integrated in their actual educational curricula, or if teachers felt that the introduction of these resources would improve the educational experience of their students. This paper addresses the usage and usability of open educational resources from teachers' perceptions. For this, we utilized the Open Discovery Space portal, a socially-powered and multilingual open educational resources' repository intended to support teachers, students and parents to intuitively identify, share, reuse and revise digital learning resources. This analysis was performed taking into account both actual content and ancillary services offered by the portal (e.g., content sharing, content discussion, community building), and was methodologically organized as a streamlined cognitive walkthrough that included two evaluation workshops in late 2013 and early 2014, and a further debriefing survey in mid 2014. The first workshop included a brief course to teachers on the functionalities and aims of the Open Discovery Space portal and an assessment survey. The second workshop was devoted to answer the questions posed by the teachers participating after a 6-week period of usage and reflection. Again, the workshop was completed with an assessment survey on the portal's content and services. Finally, in mid 2014 a final evaluation, survey-based session was (will be at the time of writing this abstract) carried out after continuing interaction with the portal's content and services during several months.

Usability is widely acknowledged in the ICT-related literature as one of the most important factors that can directly affect the overall acceptance and success of any ICT application, tool, software, and platform. Ensuring usability is one of the main challenges of e-learning system developers. This paper describes two case studies designed to (i) evaluate the usability and (ii) assess the impact on school learning of the newly designed ODS Portal. The paper presents the development of the testing/evaluation methodology, the evaluation exercise, and the analysis of the results from an extensive "use and usability" evaluation of the Open Discovery Space educational online platform.

With the popularization of online repositories and content management systems, digital resources available to organize educational activities proliferate. Digital resources include many different possibilities besides content, like events, people, or hardware devices and software applications. We propose a conceptualization of the educational domain by means of an ontology aimed to comprehensively classify educational resources. This ontology may serve as the foundation of complex knowledge-based systems to assist teachers in the categorization, selection and retrieval of the most suitable resources for any educational activity in any educational scenario they wish to design and implement.

This article discusses a modular, accessible platform that provides a computing environment for people with disabilities accessible through adapted control devices and the television set at users’ homes. Relying on a standard television set as the presentation device allows dependent individuals, especially people with disabilities, to introduce new technological advances in communication and information management in their everyday lives. As a proof-of-concept, the solution presented offers a collection of educational and training services related to teleworking and the search of employment targeted to people with disabilities. A smart job advisor included among these services, which was designed to help our target users to locate job offers that best suit the abilities and disabilities of a particular individual, is also discussed to illustrate how semantic technologies can be applied to increase the perceived accessibility and inclusion by reducing the dependence from other persons. The platform developed, the introduction of semantic technologies, and the way adapted interfacing and presentation devices were integrated may also serve as inspiration to provide services to people with disabilities.

While many innovations in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have emerged over the last two decades, the uptake of these innovations has not always been very successful, particularly in schools. The transition from proof of concept to integration into learning activities has been recognized as a bottleneck for quite some time. This major problem, which is affecting many TEL stakeholders, is the focus of the four year iTEC project that is developing a comprehensive approach.

This paper describes a multi-device Learning Management System based on Moodle with alternative interfaces providing accessibility for people with disabilities. The software architecture built over Moodle is described as well as the interface created to offer access through a TV. An initial user focus group has been used to test and get feedback for further developments of the system.

This paper introduces the iTEC SDE (Scenario Development Environment), a recommendation system to assist teachers in the creation of lesson plans. A key functionality of the SDE is the recommendation of people. Basically, taking into account new pedagogical approaches, this system manages information about potential lesson plan contributors and provides recommendations on the best available people to participate in specific learning activities. The SDE has been developed as a multi-criteria recommender focused on supporting learning activities in particular technological and educational contexts. In this way, it manages information about the devices and applications available in the classroom and the features of the students, such as educational level, language, age, location, etc. The final goal of this system is to support teachers creating lesson plans in which they can develop new pedagogical approaches involving new technologies and external resources, such as people from outside the school. Eventually, this will contribute to engage students and improve learning.

Game·Tel is an open source software system that supports personalized learning, focusing on serious games and simulations, making these and traditional content accessible and adaptive to the student and educational context. In this paper we discuss about its design and functionalities, its modular architecture and the multi-environment approach.

The increasing volume of eGovernment-related services is demanding new approaches for service integration and interoperability in this domain. Semantic web (SW) technologies and applications can leverage the potential of eGovernment service integration and discovery, thus tackling the problems of semantic heterogeneity characterizing eGovernment information sources and the different levels of interoperability. eGovernment services will therefore be semantically described in the foreseeable future. In an environment with semantically annotated services, software agents are essential as the entities responsible for exploiting the semantic content in order to automate some tasks, and so enhance the user's experience. In this paper, we present a framework that provides a seamless integration of semantic web services and intelligent agents technologies by making use of ontologies to facilitate their interoperation. The proposed framework can assist in the development of powerful and flexible distributed systems in complex, dynamic, heterogeneous, unpredictable and open environments. Our approach is backed up by a proof-of-concept implementation, where the breakthrough of integrating disparate eGovernment services has been tested.

Contemporary approaches to ICT use in educational settings vary from simple scenarios of content management to highly structured learning processes supported by process engines. The latter approach is that of Educational Modeling Languages, which structure learning processes as a flow of tasks that are assigned to a certain user/group. From an extensive literature review, the main drawback that is hindering the adoption of this approach is that of the adaptation: learning processes are previously designed to be posteriorly enacted by a process engine. A simple change in the process definition due to a non foreseen situation entails to stop and enact it again. This is a mayor flaw of this kind of approaches, because of its excessive rigidity. In this paper we make a review of current state-of-the-art in process engines that support learning processes, and we propose an execution semantics that supports exception handling in learning scenarios.

Nowadays early childhood schools are places where kids are not only taken care of but also where carefully planned educational activities (based on pedagogical frameworks) are carried out. In such centers, practitioners observe, analyze and assess children’s progress on a daily basis. Using this data, they plan new stimulating activities for the kids taken into account their personal traits and competence level. This paper presents an ICT-based system that allows parents and practitioners collaborate and share their responsibility as children’s educators both in classroom and home settings. Using a TV set as main access device, the parents can watch interactive training videos from the commodity of their living room, track child’s progress, access to child’s portfolio, receive recommendations of educational activities or add their own observations among other services. In such a way the system seeks to strengthen the home-school link, to enhance the overall quality in early childhood services and to create an educational community committed to the well-being and education of children.

In this paper we show an e-learning system that is offered following an E-learning-as-a-Service (EaaS) model. The e-learning system is based on the PoEML specification and it supports the instructional design and development of learning experiences in accordance with different pedagogical approaches. A main issue in this model is to enable the integration with third party systems. We adopt some interfaces proposed in recent standardization initiatives and provide middleware to facilitate the integration of the e-learning system with specific tools that can be used to complement the functionality provided by the system (e.g., simulators, games). This system is being developed in the context of a project whose purpose is to enable the combination of Web-based and IPTV learning experiences. This development will allow us to assess the EaaS model for the support of ubiquitous learning places.

Moodle is the most used of open-source learning management systems (LMSs). In relation with its support of collaborative learning, Moodle counts with a number of collaborative tools which allow participants to collaborate freely. The main drawback in current Moodle approach to collaboration is that free collaboration does not guarantee that learning is produced. To enhance the learning outcome, interactions among participants, as well as the information they interchange, have to be structured. These process-based collaboration structures are named learnflows, in analogy with the workflow domain. In this paper we propose a method to extend Moodle with learnflow capabilities, by using a generic-purpose workflow engine exposed as a Web service to execute the learnflows, and by doing the intervention at the Moodle side in an aspect oriented software development (AOSD) fashion.

Early childhood education has evolved from simply taking care of children to being an integrated stage within the development process. ICT are playing a key role to improve this process and to let families and educators to cooperate. A set of specific requirements of childhood education prevent ICT from a so deep penetration as at other levels. Despite of that, some electronic devices and software tools have been already applied to this educational domain. However, they have been used in isolation, lacking integration mechanisms that would have improved their efficiency. This paper describes the main features of a holistic framework aimed at providing support to ICT-based educational processes in early childhood. The main requirements, actors and relationships involved are presented altogether with a state-of-the-art technological platform that, based upon standards and specifications for learning technologies, facilitates the development and integration of ICT tools supporting early childhood education.

In this paper we present a solution to obtain useful and reliable user logs in a Learning Management System (LMS).Current LMS logs are combined with biometric-based logs that show the student behaviour. Our system models the student behaviour, allowing to know exactly how much time the student spends in front of the computer examining the con-tents of the LMS. Besides, user verification and face tracking are also integrated, what guarantees that the student is the person actually interacting with the system. The presented multimodal solution for user tracking and user ver-ification combines face tracking, face verification, speakerverification and fingerprint verification. Face tracking and face verification are performed in a non-collaborative fashion. Fingerprint or speaker verification is performed on demand, with the aim of avoiding a negative influence of adverse environmental or behavioural human factors in the reliability of the user logs generated by the system. These circumstances can thwart the non collaborative face veri-fication performance involved in the tracking process. The presented solution solves the problem of user tracking and authentication even in adverse environments for face verification.

Providing support for eGovernment services is currently a high-speed race for public administrations and research institutions. In this process towards a fully transactional platform, several projects have made their contribution. Regretfully, current solutions unveils some drawbacks regarding interoperability and accessibility issues. In this context, this paper proposes a semantic approach to fulfill holistic services in the domain. Semantics is called to play a role of first importance as a tool for interoperability. LifeEvents and AdministrativeServices are artifacts defined within this technology. Using these, an entire software architecture is derived and, eventually implemented by means of a software platform also described in this paper. Finally, some conclusions are presented.

Abstract This paper addresses the development of new web sites by reusing already existing contents from external sources. Unlike common links, which retrieve the whole web resource, we propose an approach where partial retrieval is possible. In our case, the unit for reuse is a node in a DOM tree. A suitable proposal for extracting just one single node is presented. This solution permits the partial reuse of external and heterogeneous web contents with no need for client (browser) modifications and with only minor changes for web servers. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Nowadays many LMSs are available providing a broad range of functionalities and services to support teaching and learning. These systems are appropriate for most common pedagogical approaches, but they are not suitable enough for collaborative and practice-based scenarios. EMLs were proposed several years ago in order to provide a general solution to this problem. Particularly, the well-known IMS learning design specification is intended to support the description or educational units in accordance with different pedagogies. Nevertheless, this language uniquely solves one part of the problem, as a corresponding LMS that process such descriptions is required. At this point the main concern is the large size of such a system, provoking high-development and maintenance costs. To solve this problem this paper introduces a modular-based LMS engine, based in a very structured EML, that facilitates the development of whole LMSs in an incremental and customized way.

This paper introduces a generalized solution to support the development and reuse of practical educational scenarios. It is intended to complement the reuse initiatives already proposed for LMS resources, such as LOM, SCORM or IMS. These initiatives are mainly focused in media contents. By the contrary, this proposal is concerned with the tools that can be used in practical educational scenarios: simulators, remote labs, communication tools, etc. It considers the way in which these tools can be described, but also the way in which these tools are intended to be used. At this point, three main issues are supported: authorizations, awareness and interaction. This proposal is part of a more comprehensible development based in the language PoEML. It extends the IMS Learning Design capabilities to support practical scenarios through a generalized solution.

Despite of the advances in the e-learning domain during the last decades, there is a lack of suitable mechanism to carry out assessment with the appropriate measures to avoid cheating. Current LMSs do not provide the needed features to check that the intended student is taking the online exam by himself, or even to know if he has spent the whole session time in front of the computer. This paper presents a web-based application that offers biometric authentication based on face-recognition. This application, which can be easily integrated in currently available LMSs, is able to use face-recognition during access control, tracking and assessment. Thus it is possible to improve security during critical phases in the learning process (e.g. assessment).

This paper deals with a separation of concerns proposal for educational modeling languages (EMLs). Basically, it proposes to structure these languages in a way different from the one proposed by the IMS learning design (LD) specification, currently considered as the standard EML. We assume that the LD specification is very complex and it is difficult to develop design and runtime applications and to produce EML-educational materials. Therefore, our goal is to simplify the LD specification. The main idea is not to attain the modeling of educational materials as a whole problem, but to divide it in several separated parts that could be solved in a step by step way. We propose two different kinds of parts: perspectives and aspects

The objective of educational modeling languages (EML) is to provide a containment framework of elements that can describe any design of a teaching-learning situation in a formal way. In this paper we propose a methodology to evaluate how well an EML supports the realization of such descriptions. The methodology is based on the identification of perspectives and patterns. We consider perspectives as features of a learning situation that should be described by an EML and that can be analyzed separately. For each considered perspective, we study the patterns involved, i.e., the more frequent situations. Perspectives and patterns provide the criterions that constitute an evaluation framework. So far, we have focused the methodology in collaborative learning and in the IMS learning design specification.

Nowadays, there is a huge demand for group-based learning (GBL) pedagogies, involving learners in so-called "active" and "rich" pedagogies. We describe the basis of a meta-model to support the design of computer-supported GBL processes and scenarios. Such proposal is related with recent innovative developments in the e-learning domain: Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs) and CSCL scripts. An EML provides a framework of elements that supports the description of any design of a teaching-learning experience in a formal way, involving learning participants, resources, tasks, scenarios, etc. CSCL scripts are proposed as tasks processes that aim to facilitate GBL by specifying tasks in collaborative settings, eventually sequencing these tasks and assigning them to learners. Therefore, pedagogical designs may be processed by appropriate software engines to enact them, providing automatic management and coordination of the involved elements. The meta-model proposed in this paper is conceived as an initial step to create a new EML.

Web Content Management Systems support both access to content and content management using a Web interface. However, navigation-based access to content is not ideal for some tasks, like content analysis and assessment, report generation, education, filing or third-party distribution. This paper discusses a cost-effective approach to the generation of high-quality printed versions of content held in a Web Content Management System using typesetting software. This approach is illustrated with two case studies. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Workshop for Learning Technologies, within the European Committee for Standardization (CEN/ISSS WS-LT), produced the Learning Technology Standards Observatory, a Web portal where those interested in the LT standardization process can get familiar with it, learn the main differences between related specifications, follow what is going on, what is planned for the near future and furthermore participate in the process itself. This paper presents the main functionalities and content areas within this site and how users can benefit from its use.

The objective of the IMS learning design (IMS-LD) specification is to provide a containment framework of elements that can describe any design of a teaching-learning in a formal way. It does not impose any learning approach and is pedagogical independent. In this way, learning designers can precisely prescribe the instructional and teaching strategies. The problem is how common teachers can develop appropriate IMS-LD contents. This paper presents an adequate design approach based on design patterns. Design patterns are being proposed in learning to facilitate the design activities from non expert users. We find these proposals valuable, but consider that additional efforts are required. We propose a language of design patterns for learning, hierarchical structured in several aggregation layers. In addition, we consider generative design issues to obtain IMS-LD materials.

In order to enable teachers to share and reuse learning objects, these objects should be described using standard metadata such as the IEEE's learning object metadata. Learning object metadata elements must be described using appropriate vocabularies in order to ensure semantic interoperability and facilitate resource description discovery and reuse. LOM elements can be described using simple vocabularies and value lists, LOM vocabularies, taxonomies, classifications and thesauri and natural language. CEN/ISSS has funded the development of a registry of taxonomies and vocabularies relevant for a European learning society. It is recommended that metadata implementers publish their vocabularies in the registry to reduce duplication of effort and facilitate semantic interoperability.

E-learning takes advantage of the new features offered by Web services: integration of heterogeneous applications, publicity of available services, etc. As the adoption of this new technology increases it will become necessary to offer intermediary platforms that make it easier to find and locate services, and composing new services from the existing ones. Additionally, it will also be necessary to provide value-added services like auditing, security or management. We present a proposal for a standard-based intermediary framework for Web services.

In spite of the advantages reported by the research community, adaptive learning systems have failed to gain widespread acceptance. A critical factor that will determine the popularization of these systems is the possibility of using the standardized data models for exchanging and reusing learning resources.

We describe a set of modeling techniques for developing vertical applications in specific domains. Previous approaches are mainly focused on obtaining final applications. We propose a methodology to obtain standards-driven service architectures used to build those final applications. This methodology is based on the OMG's MDA (Model Driven Architecture), the Unified Software Development Process and recommendations by other authors like Bass et al. (1999). To test the proposed methodology we have chosen learning/training as our vertical application domain. Also, we have used CORBA as the implementation/deployment environment for the last phases of this experience work. As a result, we have developed a Domain CORBA Facility for learning/training, whose defined services have been derived from a strict and systematic software development process.

The learning technology standardization process is taking one of the leading roles in the research efforts into computer-based education. Institutions like the IEEE, the US Department of Defense and the European Commission have set up committees to deliver recommendations and specifications on this area. Their goal is to provide interoperability among heterogeneous systems and reuse of learning objects. From this standardization work, we propose am open and distributed architecture that identifies some common software services for the e-learning domain. Our aim is to contribute to this standardization process from the software perspective.

This paper presents a layered component model to support Web-based interactive and collaborative applications. It is intended to let programmers focus on the particular logic of their applications, avoiding most of the issues related to collaboration, access control and networking management. A Web-based educational application has been developed over this framework. This tele-education system, which follows the recommendations by the main institutions involved in the learning technology standardization process, is the second contribution presented by the authors.

We present a layered component model to support Web-based collaborative applications. We show how this model lets programmers focus on the particular logic of their applications, avoiding most of the issues related to collaboration, access control, and network management. The proposed model is organized into three layers on top of a foundation composed of commercial-off-the-shelf services and standard Internet protocols. The service level provides a network-transparent communications layer, database access, and distributed data interchange. The component level offers typical collaborative services, like user management, auditing, user-oriented messaging, higher-level events, project management, and a bulletin board. The application level supports actual applications constructed using the services offered by the underlying layers. A Web-based educational application has been developed over this framework to illustrate the process. This tele-education system, which follows the recommendations of the main institutions involved in the learning technology standardization process, is the second contribution presented by the authors.

Abstract This paper describes a layered framework to support WWW‐based interactive and collaborative applications. Using some commercial‐off‐the‐shelf (COTS) software, three basic services are built: virtual rooms, virtual file systems, and database connectivity. These services are used at a second layer, which actually provides the functionality of the framework. The components that have been described at this level can be embedded in WWW‐based business applications in an easy and direct way. Therefore, programmers can focus on the particular logic of their applications, avoiding most of the issues related to collaboration, networking, and access control. In order to test the developed framework a WWW‐based educational application has been implemented. This tele‐education system, with innovative features in the field of WWW‐based practical training, is the second contribution presented by the authors. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract The Internet and the WWW have encouraged the adoption of a three‐tiered architectural style as the general framework for distributed computing. The thin client concept associated with this model is the most suitable for the WWW, because it can be easily mapped to the browser concept. Additionally, the separation of business logic (middle tier) and back‐end services enable further flexibility for the design of this kind of service. Nevertheless, the advent of platform‐independent software models like Java and the availability of common off‐the‐shelf services, like FTP or HTTP, offer new opportunities to more classical distributed computing models. In this paper we revisit the two‐tiered model for Internet environments, and show that the fat client (user interface plus business logic) may still be valid, at least in some environments. We propose two solutions to provide full FTP access from a Java applet. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Virtual machines for remote execution are a useful tool for utilizing light user interfaces and intensive application cores in different physical machines connected through the Internet. In a virtual machine, application cores are distributed in a network. Specific locations, operating systems and hardware characteristics are hidden by virtual machines. They make it possible to use a PC to execute user interfaces and (a few) high-performance computers for application cores. We present a Java/CORBA-based brokerage platform that allows remote execution of optimization solvers from a client running on any platform. The system offers a dynamic library of available problem solvers, and a graphic interface to browse several defined properties and metadata on available solvers. In addition, an embedded file compression module to reduce data transfer time is included as a plug-in feature of the proposed virtual machine. Analogous systems could be constructed for applications in which interaction traffic time is much lower than execution time. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The authors present DelfosnetX, an information retrieval (IR) system intended to evaluate different relevance analysis and ranking techniques for metadata-enabled IR, and more specifically, XML based IR. The theoretical background that supports the proposed model is also discussed.