A Declarative Approach for Managing and Querying e-Learning Objects

E-learning is about using IT technologies to support on-line learning processes. In this context, a learning object (LO) is a re-usable digital content, which has some metadata associated with it to facilitate its search, retrieval and processing, which includes assemble it with other LOs to form a more complex one. An interesting form to retrieve and manipulate collections of LOs is declaratively via a query language. However, current languages used to achieve this are either aimed to a particular implementation of LOs (e.g. XML for instance) or lack the required features to manage and query collections of LOs adequately. This paper introduces the Learning Object Query Language (LOQL), and its associated evaluation techniques, which allows a user/application to create, assemble, update and query LOs, independently of any particular implementation. A prototype system has been implemented to test these ideas.