This paper presents the technical infrastructure of the COSMOS educational web repository which allows teachers and other users to search, retrieve and re-use educational content and/or lesson plans of interest. To fulfill these objectives, the COSMOS project integrates state of the art web technologies in the framework of (i) content description, (ii) user intercommunication and creation of different user’s roles, groups and permissions, (iii) system hardening and auditing, (iv) new content notification tools through the use of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) protocol, (v) revision control mechanisms, (vi) rights description and management tools, (vii) multi-lingual support, (viii) document management schemes and (ix) advanced search capabilities. The portal is being developed using an open source content management platform, called Drupal.
Educational content within the portal is tagged with metadata according to the IEEE LOM standard. The description is classified with respect to domain specific vocabularies, especially developed during the project, while multi-lingual vocabularies and searching on them is supported. Export and import functions of the vocabularies in XML format are also supported in order to allow data interoperability and exchangeability among distributed and heterogeneous repositories.
As far as user’s groups and roles are concerned, the portal supports six types of users, anonymous, authenticated, editor, educational content provider, translator and administrators. The portal supports system hardening and auditing in order to eliminate as many security risks as possible. Furthermore, the developed science portal is enhanced with the RSS protocol used to immediately notify for new content. Finally, the system supports Revision Control System (RCS) which automates storing, retrieval, logging, identification and merging of revisions. This means that a user can retrieve previous versions of the submitted content in case that the current one does not satisfy his/her needs.
Content rights are represented using the Right Expression Language of the MPEG-21 standard. In particular we support the ccREL (Common Creative REL) description. The XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) is technology used for embedding rights related metadata in educational files. The XMP defines a right management schema, while the ccREL the content rights description interface.
The portal allows an intelligent search and retrieval of the educational content. Search is accomplished using the multi-lingual educational vocabularies. This will be validated and tested during the COSMOS activities with several teachers and students in secondary education and university level.