An Interoperability Infrastructure for Distributed Feed Networks

Fridolin Wild, Steinn E. Sigurðarson, Stefan Sobernig, Christina Stahl, Ahmet Soylu, Vahur Rebas, Dariusz Górka, Anna Danielewska-Tulecka, Antonio Tapiador
2007 European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning  
Blogs have the aordance to become an integral part of teaching and learning processes as a vehicle for knowledge management. Open, exible systems integrating blogs provide user-friendly, personalised microlearning environments while ensuring ubiquitous access. This paper concentrates on blog interoperability in an open space for learning and collaboration. As blogging is one of the most popular web-based forms of publishing today, there is a plethora of dierent blogging tools, feed readers, and
more » ... aggregators, enabling information dissemination, ltering, and retrieval. Several dierent data structure and interaction standards emerged which make integration a real challenge. This paper aims at creating distributed microlearning environments basing on networks of integrated blogs, discusses problems of such an integration along with possible solutions, and proposes an architecture for loosely-coupled blog integration. The core of this infrastructure consists of a service interface for feed management that allows learners as well as facilitators to automatically set up channel structures for feed syndication, while eectively reducing the management eorts thereof through proper system support. Motivation The conglomerate of all blogs available online, the so-called 'blogosphere', has been certied to show a bursty evolution at least since 2001 [1] , where an eruptive rise can be identied not only regarding metrics of scale but also with respect to deepening community structures and higher degrees of connectedness. As with July 2007, for example, Technorati is indexing 90 million blogs [2]: Blogging is obviously an increasingly popular phenomenon, although meta-studies reveal that between one half and two thirds of all blogs are abandoned within only two months after their creation [3] . One of the reasons that blogs became so attractive is their ease of use, removing barriers of technoliteracy from web selfpublishing [4] . There is a plethora of web-publishing tools, allowing the user to choose from a large variety of (non-) commercial hosting services. Moreover,
dblp:conf/ectel/WildSSSSRGDT07 fatcat:dxwibvfjpbgf3dnqmspwxqumf4