Zenaminer: driving the SCORM Standard towards the Web of Data

In this paper we present Zenaminer, a software architecture for linking the SCORM standard to the Linked Open Data cloud. The main idea is to overcome some limitations of the SCORM Content Packaging standard, the most used standard for sharing e-learning contents, in order to migrate this material into the Web of Data. We analyze the design of a RESTful Web Service for SCORM where each single SCO (Sharable Content Object) is exposed on the web as raw data that can be created, read, updated, and deleted through the HTTP protocol. In addition, borrowing the idea from the concept of web mashup, we propose to build the Learning Management System interface as a mashup that uses Zenaminer web API to access SCO data and that customizes the presentation and interaction with the help of additional CSS and Javascript. To achieve this goal, for the creation of the HTML material, we suggest to use a “light formalism” defined by the W3C with the name Slidy so that the presentation remains separated from the content. Finally, Zenaminer allow users to enrich the SCORM resources with comments. Comments can be contents themselves that extend and improve the original material of the teacher. Unstructured comments are automatically annotated with Spotlight linking them to the LOD cloud through DBpedia.