During the recent IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS) quarterly meeting, that took place at the Open University of the Netherlands in Heerlen, the establishment and launch of the new SIG on federated architectures took place. David Massart, Senior Software Architect from European Schoolnet, was appointed to co-chair the SIG with Martin Morrey from Intrallect, a Scottish Learning Object Repository System vendor.

The SIG on Federated Architectures will establish a typology of federated architectures and elicit the components that are needed to build them. Moreover, the SIG will take stock on the state-of-the-art implementations, such as the EUN Learning Resource Exchange (LRE), CORDRA, and GLOBE.

The final outcome of the SIG should be a "cookbook" for deploying federated infrastructures for learning, a document that, once approved, will be endorsed by IMS. The importance of this type of work for the area of e-learning is significant, as federations are a key allow for connecting not only learning resources repositories together, but also to interact with digital libraries and cultural heritage organisations that have various types of repositories.

Query Language work is advancing

The work on query languages for learning resources repositories is crucial to support the exchange of queries between heterogeneous learning resource repositories. In last few years European Schoolnet has greatly contributed to the creation of SQI, a Simple Query Interface, that enables federated searches throughout the repositories.

SQI should be used in combination with a query language. Under the auspice of the ProLearn Network of Excellence, a group of interested developers is working on PLQL, a query language for learning repositories. PLQL is primarily a “query interchange format” used by e-learning applications to query learning resource repositories using the SQI protocol. PLQL combines two features: support of keyword-based search and support of exact matching.

The PQL 1.0 will come out at the end of the year and will be integrated as a component of the EUN Learning Resource Exchange where it will complement S2QL, the simple school query language. The final version of PLQL is expected on July 1st, 2007.

Related links:

IMS Global: http://www.imsglobal.org
LRE: http://lre.eun.org
FIRE: http://fire.eun.org
Intrallect: http://www.intrallect.com/
CORDRA: http://www.adlnet.gov/technologies/cordra/index.cfm
GLOBE: http://globe.edna.edu.au/globe/go

PLQL: http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/lomi/index.php/QueryLanguages