Abstract
The sharing and reuse of digital information has been an important computing concern since the early 1960s. With the advent of the World Wide Web (from now on referred to as the Web), these concerns have become even more central to the effective use of distributed information resources. From its initial roots as an information-sharing tool, the Web has seen exponential growth in a myriad of applications, ranging from very serious e-business to pure leisure environments. Likewise, research into technology support for education has quickly recognised the potential and possibilities for using the Web as a learning tool (Ishaya, Jenkins, & Goussios, 2002). Thus, Web technology is now an established medium for promoting student learning, and today there are a great many online learning materials, tutorials, and courses supported by different learning tools with varying levels of complexity. It can be observed that there are many colleges and universities, each of which teaches certain concepts based on defined principles that remain constant from institution to institution. This results in thousands of similar descriptions of the same concept. This means that institutions spend a lot of resources producing multiple versions of the same learning objects that could be shared at a much lower cost. The Internet is a ubiquitous supporting environment for the sharing of learning materials. As a consequence, many institutions take advantage of the Internet to provide online courses (Ishaya et al.; Jack, Bonk, & Jacobs, 2002; Manouselis, Panagiotu, Psichidou, & Sampson, 2002). Many other agencies have started offering smaller and more portable learning materials defined as learning objects (Harris, 1999; PROMETEUS, 2002). While there are many initiatives for standardising learning technologies (Anido, Fernandez, Caeiro, Santos, Rodriguez, & Llamas, 2002) that will enable reuse and interoperability, there is still a need for the effective management, extraction, and assembling of relevant learning objects for end-user satisfaction.