Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1. The conversation schema of course maintenance
systems”. As part of the duty of the course instructor in his/her effort to make the necessary adjustments
for the benefit of students, whenever there's a significant change in the content of several designated
Web pages of online course materials, he/she should notify by e-mails the students who are taking the
course and those who are interested in the topic. The conversation model of the system consists of the
following core elements:
•
Student information agent (ST):
A Student Information Agent is designed for providing services
about student information, such as providing an e-mail list for a course by automatically maintain-
ing the email list of students taking a course; and maintaining the profile of each student. While
student information agent performs various tasks, for our purpose, we use
EM
to denote the email
domain and predicate
ST
(
e
,
s
) to denote that an notification email
e
is sent to student
s
.
•
Noti. cation agent (NT):
The basic function of the Notification Agent is to send e-mails to students
who take the course according to the student profiles stored in a database when the course material
has been significantly changed. We use
NF
to denote the domain of notifications and predicate
NT
(
n
,
e
) to denote that email
e
is to disseminate notification
n
.
•
Monitoring agent (MT):
This agent maintains the content of the topic tree, a course material
URL database, monitors updates and notifies the notification agent when a change is made to
the database. The domain handled by the monitoring agent is the topic link database
LK
. We use
predicate
MT
(
l
,
n
) to denote that notification
n
is created in accordance to the change made on
topic link
l
.
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