A semantic approach to discovering learning services in grid-based collaborative systems

CSCL systems can benefit from using grids since they offer a common infrastructure enabling access to an extended pool of resources that can provide supercomputing capabilities as well as specific hardware resources. Adopting a service oriented architecture such as OGSA can further benefit CSCL systems, enabling increased flexibility to adapt and reuse learning software offered by third party providers. However, service discovery is a challenge for educators, since they cannot use their own domain abstractions to search for learning services that may support their educational settings. Common service discovery mechanisms, such as the Index Service or UDDI, provide limited discovery capabilities since they rely on keyword matching and cannot deal with the description of service properties. In order to address these drawbacks, formal semantics of ontologies can be employed to represent semantic descriptions of services that can be exploited for service discovery. This paper proposes an ontology of CSCL tools that uses meaningful learning abstractions to describe them. That ontology is the basis of a service discovery facility that is developed for allowing educators to search service-based CSCL tools using learning concepts.