Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Intelligent Distributed
eLearning Architecture
S. Stoyanov
1
, H. Zedan
2
, E. Doychev
1
, V. Valkanov
1
,
I. Popchev
1
, G. Cholakov
1
and M. Sandalski
1
1
University of Plovdiv,
2
de Montfort University - Leicester Country
1
Bulgaria
2
UK
1. Introduction
One of the main characteristics of the eLearning systems today is the 'anytime-anywhere-
anyhow' delivery of electronic content, personalized and customized for each individual user.
To satisfy this requirement new types of context-aware and adaptive software architectures are
needed, which are enabled to sense aspects of the environment and use this information to
adapt their behavior in response to changing situation. In conformity with [Dey,2000], a
context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity
may be a person, a place, or an object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a
user and an application, including the user and the application themselves.
Development of context-aware and adaptive architectures can be benefited from some ideas
and approaches of pervasive computing. Pervasive computing is a new paradigm for next-
generation distributed systems where computers disappear in the background of the users'
everyday activities. In such a paradigm computation is performed on a multitude of small
devices interconnected through a wireless network. Fundamental to pervasive computing is
that any component (including user, hardware and software) can be mobile and that
computations are context-aware. As a result, mobility and context-awareness are important
features of any design framework for pervasive computing applications. Context-awareness
requires applications to be able to sense aspects of the environment and use this information
to adapt their behaviours in response to changing situations.
One of the main goals of the Distributed eLearning Centre (DeLC) project [Ganchev, 2005] is
the development of such an architecture and corresponding software that could be used
efficiently for on-line eLearning distance education. The approach adopted for the design
and development of the system architecture is focused on the development of a service-
oriented and agent-based intelligent system architecture providing wireless and fixed access
to electronic services and electronic content. This chapter provides a general description of
the architecture for two types of access - mobile and fixed.
Furthermore, we present the Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA in short) for the
modelling and verification of mobile systems that are context-aware. This process calculus is
