Developing a Brokering Architecture for Multimedia Learning Objects on the Semantic Web

The World Wide Web is changing. While once conceived of and implemented as a collection of static pages for browsing, it now promises to become a web of services-a dynamic aggregate of interactive, automated, and intelligent services that interoperate via the Internet. For the web of services model to succeed, techniques which match service requestors with service providers must be developed. In particular, such techniques are especially important for highly demanding applications such as e-Learning. Such educational applications developed for the Semantic Web require some kind of reasoning capability. Providing sound and complete reasoning services is essential for many of these applications to function properly. In this paper, we present a Multimedia Learning Object Brokering Architecture implemented using Apache Axis, Jena and Pellet. The Broker component determines which MLOs satisfy a query based upon information contained in one or more domain-specific ontologies. The system's requestor and provider components are designed specifically for use with SVG slideshow presentations described using the CanCore standard. All queries are expressed in OWL-OQL, a concise OWL query language created for use with our brokering system.