UREKA Learning-Object Taxonomy & Repository Architecture - ULTRA

Around the world, academic institutions, professional associations and corporations are striving to make better use of networks and databases to efficiently and effectively achieve learning and professional development goals. One of the ways chosen to pursue these goals is to make learning resources readily accessible to educators and learners through learning object repositories. Therefore, the use of information technologies to create new learning resources, manage the existing ones and aggregate learning content from a wide variety of academic and publishing sources, will affect teaching and learning by automating these processes, considerably bringing down its cost and cutting short on the time required to prepare learning materials. UREKA learning-object taxonomy & repository architecture - ULTRA, a part of UREKA - an education multimedia database, defines learning object repository (LOR) that is an easy-to-use and standards-based learning object repository that can store, share, reuse and classify learning objects (LOs), digital assets (e.g. movies, animations, images, etc.) and other content objects. In this paper the authors defined the architecture of ULTRA that not only classifies and stores learning objects but also facilitates in the process of metadata collection using profiles.