Abstract: Annotating learning material with metadata allows easy reusability
by different learning/tutoring systems. Several metadata standards have been
developed to represent learning objects and courses. A learning system needs to
use pedagogic attributes including document type, topic, coverage of concepts,
and for each concept the significance and the role. Moreover, in order to have
a flexible and reusable repository of e-learning materials, it is necessary
that the annotation of the documents with such metadata be done in an automatic
fashion as far as possible. This paper describes the attributes that represent
some important pedagogic characteristics of learning materials. To reduce the
overhead of manual annotation we have explored the feasibility of automatic
annotation of learning materials with metadata. This facilitates the creation
of an elearning open repository for storing these annotated learning materials,
which can be used by learning systems. The automatic annotation is based on a
domain knowledge base and a number of algorithms like standard classification
algorithms, parsing and analysis of documents have been used for this purpose.
The results show a fair degree of accuracy, which may be improved in future
using more sophisticated algorithms.
Keywords: Learning object metadata, automatic metadata extraction, open repository