Concept Space Interchange Protocol: A protocol for concept map based resource discovery in educational digital libraries

The Strand Map Service provides resource discovery in digital libraries using strand maps developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, project 2061. Strand maps are a special kind of concept maps that contains interconnected learning goals organized along grade groups and topical strands. The Strand Map Service provides programmatic access to AAAS strand maps that can be used by educational digital libraries to dynamically build resource discovery interfaces. The programmatic access to strand maps is enabled by the Concept Space Interchange Protocol, which provide following services (1) service capability determination, (2) resource alignment, and (3) search and retrieval of dynamically generated strand maps. The protocol is implemented as a web service and integration experiments have been performed for two educational digital libraries. In this poster we describe the Concept Space Interchange Protocol and its integration with educational digital libraries.