Abstract Web search is a crucial technology for the digital economy. Dominated by a few gatekeepers focused on commercial success, however, web publishers have to optimize their content for these gatekeepers, resulting in a closed ecosystem of search engines as well as the risk of publishers sacrificing quality. To encourage an open search ecosystem and offer users genuine choice among alternative search engines, we propose the development of an Open Web Index (OWI). We outline six core principles for developing and maintaining an open index, based on open data principles, legal compliance, and collaborative technology development. The combination of an open index with what we call declarative search engines will facilitate the development of vertical search engines and innovative web data products (including, e.g., large language models), enabling a fair and open information space. This framework underpins the EU‐funded project OpenWebSearch.EU, marking the first step towards realizing an Open Web Index.

pen data and open science are terms that are becoming ever more popular. The information generated in large organizations is of great potential for organizations, future research, innovation, and more. Currently, there is a wide range of similar guidelines for publishing organizational data, focusing on data anonymization containing conflicting ideas and steps. These guidelines usually do not focus on the whole process of assessing risks, evaluating, and distributing data. In this paper, the relevant tasks from different open data frameworks have been identified, adapted, and synthesized into a six-step framework to transform organizational data into open data while offering privacy protection to organisational users. As part of the research, the framework was applied to a CERN dataset and expert interviews were conducted to evaluate the results and the framework. Drawbacks of the frameworks were identified and suggested as improvements for future work.

Development of an educational game that can be integrated into a course within a Learning Management System (LMS) is a challenging task both from the didactic and from the technical point of view. A thorough evaluation of students' playing performance on LMS-side requires informative user-specific data that have to be collected during gameplay and then transferred to the LMS. Standardized interaction technologies like Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specify mechanisms that can be applied for implementing functionality to exchange students' competence profiles and traces. The Knowledge-Management Eco-System Portal of the European funded RAGE (Realizing an Applied Gaming Ecosystem) Research and Innovation Action project provides capable components, assets and related utility packs for developing such functionality: besides a toolkit for creating competence based games that meet the reaquirements of Qualifications Based Learning (QBL), assets for storing individual player profiles and traces are available. Furthermore, tools for creating game-specific analytics are provided that can be embedded by LTI-compatible LMSs like Moodle. This paper is concerned with the integration of QBL-compliant competence based games into LMS-courses. A major topic is the description of an exemplar Moodle-plugin with its required functionality and interfaces to the above-mentioned RAGE assets. As the approach is not yet implemented, this paper remains on a conceptual level.

In this paper we present a modular approach for learning support in game environments. In applied or educational games both aspects are important – the fun to play and a topic to learn. While traditional games or leisure games only focus on the enjoyment and entertainment of the player, educational games also aim to convey knowledge and competences. However, in order to fulfill this goal, an applied game should take care that the player actually learns. The various components of our approach specifically support the learning aspects in a game in different and balanced ways. This includes adaptation of the game for smooth competence development, maintaining motivation, support in problem solving tasks, support for meta-cognition and reflection, and adaptation to the players' personality.

In this paper, we describe an approach for training decision making competences in emergency situations with the help of a multi-modal online environment. Decision making is an essential aspect of emergency management and a successful response to an emergency situation highly depends on whether decisions are being taken in an effective and timely manner. For this reason effective training programs are needed, in order to guarantee that emergency managers respond adequately to disasters. This paper addresses these needs by outlining and structuring the competences required for making meaningful decisions and by presenting an approach on how these competences can be trained in an online environment.

Adaptive learning systems aim to address a learner's specific needs, considering factors such as prior knowledge, learning efficiency, learning goals and motivation. Especially in distance education, often directed to adult learners with full-time jobs, it is very important to provide assistance to counteract high dropout rates. This paper describes an approach on how to support adult learners through the adoption of personalisation and guidance in Moodle. The implementation grounds on the combination of two pedagogical theories, competence-based learning and Self-Regulated Learning (SRL). Three-phases were used to roughly frame the design of the SRL learning flow, where the individual phases are supported by competence-based guidance. In this way Moodle is extended from a teacher and course management to a learner-centric system. This work has been implemented and evaluated in the course of a European project that targets vocational training of heat pump installers.

This paper presents a service that supports the evaluation of adaptive learning systems. This evaluation service has been developed for and tested with an adaptive digital libraries system created in the CUTLURA project. Based on these experiences an approach is outlined, how it can be used in a similar way to evaluate the features and aspects of adaptive learning systems. Following the layered evaluation approach, qualities are defined that are evaluated individually. The evaluation service supports the whole evaluation process, which includes modelling the qualities to be evaluated, data collection, and automatic reports based on data analysis. Multi-modal data collection facilitates continuous and non-continuous, as well as invasive and non-invasive evaluation.

This paper presents a novel approach how learning paths consisting of game units can be created and adapted to learners based on their behavior during the game play. Non-invasive assessment procedures interpret the behavior and calculate information about the competences of the learners. A user model holds probabilistic information on the competence profile. Based on this competence profile game units/stories are recommended fitting to the actual competence state of the learner. This approach is part of the EC-funded TARGET project which provides the technical infrastructure regarding the 3D virtual game environment. The innovative part of this paper is the adaptive learning strategy and how it can be included in a game-based environment. The user perspective is demonstrated on a concrete scenario where the learner has to solve a task in the game-based environment.

In this paper an approach is presented how communities of practice (CoP) can be integrated with a process model for self-regulated learning (SRL). First, it is argued that self-regulated learning happens on a general learning level as well as on a specific level which is related to use a learning group as certain learning strategy. In order to link collaborative learning to a cyclic SRL Process Modell, learning in CoPs is presented on a general and specific learning level.

In this paper, we describe the work on the visualisation tools and techniques currently developed in the GRAPPLE research project. Since the GRAPPLE project aims at developing a generic solution for adaptive e-learning, also the visualisation tools need to be as generic as the GRAPPLE approach and its data models are. This paper also discusses related work in this field and outlines differences and advantages of the newly developed visualisation tools and techniques. Especially comparisons are made with a tool which relies on visualizing competence-based knowledge structures.

Numerous techniques have been developed for visualising hierarchically structured information. This paper presents a new framework for the visualisation of hierarchies called the hierarchical visualisation system (HVS). HVS is a general framework implemented in Java. It provides a synchronised, multiple view environment for visualising, exploring and managing large hierarchies. HVS reads hierarchies either from the file system or from TreeML files. Eleven hierarchy browsers have so far been implemented within HVS, including: traditional tree views, the classic Walker tree layout, information pyramids, treemaps, a hyperbolic browser, sunburst, and cone trees. In addition to being a tool to explore and manage hierarchies, HVS was also designed to provide a platform for the empirical evaluation and comparison of different hierarchy browsers. The hierarchical visualisation testing environment (HVTE) is a semi-automated testing environment built on top of HVS. HVTE is being used for a series of comparative studies of hierarchy browsers.