The extension of web services architecture to meet the technical requirements of virtual learning environments (Moodle)

The Internet is moving from being a collection of applications toward a collection of services through the Web. Therefore, service oriented architecture (SOA) has become an active area of research and development. Web services as an example of SOA provide the integration of software applications in an incremental way, using existing platforms and languages that utilize and adapt to existing legacy systems. Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are one of the emerging domains that need to be extended to SOA. We propose extending existing Web services to use a Web services matching and selection (WSMS) system as an extension of the existing Web services framework. This system involves discovering a set of semantically equivalent services, by filtering a number of available services, that enables a collection of technical requirements in real-time, and employs the collected data in matching, selection and binding services. Hence, functional and non-functional requirements are an important issue for effectively supporting all kinds of services in the WSMS system. Therefore, we propose that the advantages shown in extending the Moodle VLE to use WSMS can be applied generically to all VLEs.