Authors:
            
                    Boris Rousseau
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Parisch Browne
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Paul Malone
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Mícheál ÓFoghlú
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    ; 
                
                    Paul Foster
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                     and
                
                    Venura Mendis
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliations:
            
                    
                        
                                1
                            
                    
                    Telecommunications Software Systems Group (TSSG), Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland
                
                    ; 
                
                    
                        
                                2
                            
                    
                    BTexact Technologies, United Kingdom
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            E-Learning, personalisation, profiling, user profile, information provider profile, resource discovery, multiple repository types.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Applications
                    ; 
                        e-Business
                    ; 
                        Education/Learning
                    ; 
                        e-Learning
                    ; 
                        Enterprise Information Systems
                    ; 
                        Human-Computer Interaction
                    ; 
                        Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
                    ; 
                        Knowledge-Based Systems
                    ; 
                        Multimedia Systems
                    ; 
                        User Needs
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                The success of the Information Society, with the overabundance of online multimedia information, has become an obstacle for users to discover pertinent resources. For those users, the key is the refinement of resource discovery as the choice and complexity of available online content continues to grow. The work presented in this paper will address this issue by representing complex extensible user and information provider profiles and content metadata using XML and the provision of a middle canonical language to aid in learner-to-content matching, independent of the underlying metadata format. This approach can provide a federated search solution leading to personalise resource discovery based on user requirements and preferences, seamlessly searching over multiple repository types. The novelty of the work includes the complex extensible user profiles, information provider profiles, the canonical language and the federated search strategy. Although, the work presented is focused on E
                -Learning, the general ideas could be applied to any resource discovery or information retrieval system.
                (More)