Abstract

Exploiting mobile technologies for educational purposes has promises of realizing ubiquitous, unobtrusive, personal and situated learning. The advent of cloud computing has meant that all the information on web, and proprietary sources of information are available instantly. But mobile learn- ing is non-trivial due to the challenges in the process of designing, communicating and presenting traditional e-learning resources to mobile learners. In this paper, we propose a generic semantics- based service-oriented infrastructure and show how semantic technologies, when used together with a cloud-based SOA, can provide mobile users with a fresh learning experience. The proposed ar- chitecture comprises a knowledge aggregation subsystem and a querying subsystem that are loosely coupled, and hence enables rapid deployment across domains with suitable domain ontologies. Fur- thermore, the service-oriented approach enables a pluggable platform that supports seamless integra- tion of legacy content from possibly multiple vendors for customizable delivery. For illustration, we consider a mobile learning scenario in a zoo, and demonstrate how a mobile user can interact with the proposed system for m-learning.