Design and implementation of metadata management system for WWW coursewares

The number of coursewares available on the Internet has increased greatly. The amount of information we can obtain from the networked environment is enormous. However, the importance of getting right information draws much attention from researchers in the community. Currently, searching techniques are developed to help the learners as well as teachers find information in the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, the users can be confused with search results due to irrelevant information, misinformation, insufficient information, etc. Searching can be performed accurately and efficiently by utilizing metadata for the Web courseware. This paper proposes a metadata management system trying to help search appropriate coursewares and shows that utilizing metadata for a search can facilitate obtaining right information on the Web. Elements of the metadata are selected and their relationships are identified in order to organize them in a relational database. Procedures to obtain the metadata for Web courseware are designed and implemented in the Microsoft ASP (active server pages). Issues on managing the metadata are addressed and implemented in the system so that addition, deletion, and update operations can be done easily via the Web. The overall metadata management system provides user-friendly interfaces to give essential information on the courseware and to handle user enquiry correctly and efficiently