Context-Aware Mobile Learning with a Semantic Service-Oriented Infrastructure

Exploiting mobile technologies for educational purposes has promises of realizing ubiquitous, unobtrusive, personal and situated learning, but is non-trivial due to the challenges in the process of designing, communicating and presenting traditional e-learning resources to mobile learners. In this paper, we propose a generic semantics-based service-oriented infrastructure and show how semantic technologies, when used together with an SOA, can provide mobile users with a fresh learning experience. The proposed architecture comprises a knowledge aggregation subsystem and a querying subsystem that are loosely coupled, and hence enables rapid deployment across domains with suitable domain ontologies. Furthermore, the service-oriented approach enables a pluggable platform that supports seamless integration of legacy content from possibly multiple vendors for customizable delivery. For illustration, we consider a mobile learning scenario in a zoo, and demonstrate how a mobile user can interact with the proposed system for m-learning.