Architecture of the Organic.Edunet Web Portal

Abstract

The use of Semantic Web technologies in educational Web portals has been reported to facilitate users’ search, access, and retrieval of learning resources. To achieve this, a number of different architectural components and services need to be harmonically combined and implemented. This article presents how this issue is dealt with in the context of a large-scale case study. More specifically, it describes the architecture behind the Organic.Edunet Web portal that aims to provide access to a federation of repositories with learning resources on agricultural topics. The various components of the architecture are presented and the supporting technologies are explained. In addition, the article focuses on how Semantic Web technologies are being adopted, specialized, and put in practice in order to facilitate ontology-aided sharing and reusing of learning resources.