The main objective of DIOGENE is to design, to implement and to evaluate a training Web brokering environment geared toward ICT professionals and able to cover the whole lifecycle of ICT vocational training inside and outside enterprises boundaries.


General Objectives

DIOGENE aims to design and implement a self-learning Web environment able to support the individual from the definition of objectives to the assessment of the results through the construction of custom self-adaptive courses. The system will be accessible through the Web and will take the form of a training portal. It will use state of the art technology (metadata and ontologies for knowledge manipulation, fuzzy learner modelling, intelligent information retrieval, distributed Web services) and, moreover, will be able to:

Give free-lance teachers the possibility to subscribe DIOGENE and to describe (in a formal way) their professional abilities. Teachers, in this way, would be considered as “learning resources” able to be exploited (if requested) by students during their learning process in order to obtain guidance. The system will be able to perform, when needed, e-commerce transactions in order to pay teacher professional performances.

Individuate learners with similar needs and/or profiles and provide them a co-operative environment to support social interactions, mentoring and the exchange of information. The same environment will be used to interface synchronously and asynchronously free-lance teachers with their students.

Apply a learner model based on an emerging standard format (e.g. PAPI, LIP, etc) to represent learner assessed achievements and obtain, for each learner, a sort of electronic CV to be published with respect to privacy requirements. A search engine operating on such CV base to allow third parties interested to hire certified staff to find qualified professional will be then developed.

Apply sound learning strategies, with respect to the Web, based on needs and individual learning styles and provide the ability to automatically improve such strategies by exploiting information about knowledge assessments before and after training experiences. Learning resources (contents and teachers) will be rated in relation to successes and failures in previous training sessions.

Despite that DIOGENE is targeted to ICT professionals, the training model and the software platform will be realised to be easily shifted and exploited in other domains, learning and training contexts.


Vertical Objectives

An important feature of DIOGENE will be the possibility to use, in the dynamic course composition process high quality contents (generally not for free) coming from registered content providers servers and freeware contents drawn directly from the Web.

This will be realised by means of different subsystems suitably interoperating and cooperating. In relation to such subsystems, DIOGENE will address the following objectives.

To arrange high quality contents covering a set of ICT related topics and to make them available to the main system. This will include the provision of a methodology relying on emerging standards and a software tool to organise and publish high quality learning objects on content provider sites and make them available to DIOGENE as Web services. This will be done in subsequent steps.
	A knowledge representation methodology able to describe learning objects in a machine-understandable way will be defined. An analysis of current standards for ontology description (e.g. SHOE, OIL, etc) and learning object metadata description (e.g. IMS, LOM, etc) will be carried out in order to let the proposed methodology be compliant with a subset of them.
	A Main Ontology covering the ICT domain will be created by experts of the field to individuate main concepts and how they are interrelated. Such ontology will be exploited by the system for course tailoring and knowledge assessment. In order to manipulate such ontology, an Ontology Manager tool will be provided.
	Registered content providers (initially consortium partners) will arrange and make available courses covering a subset of ICT topics. The already existing course material will be indexed following the chosen methodology with a Meta-Tagger tool that will be provided for this purpose. Indexed contents will remain on content provider servers but will be available to DIOGENE as Web services. In this way the system will be able to construct custom courses by assembling learning contents of different providers. The system will be able to perform e-commerce transactions in order to fulfill rights.
To create an Information Retrieval subsystem to draw freeware contents from the Web and to make them available as learning objects. This will be done by exploiting the power made available by the Web of the next generation (Semantic Web) as announced by the W3C. Thanks to the annotation of Web pages with XML tags, on-line digital contents can be, in fact, described formally in a machine intelligible fashion. Moreover, thanks to the use of standard formats for the description of ontologies, it is possible to establish common dictionaries of interrelated concepts that will constitute the semantic substratum on which an artificial intelligence engine can make inferences.
	In order to retrieve useful content to be added to a learning offer but bypassing compatibility problems between different ontological representations of the same domain, DIOGENE will use a mixed approach keyword/ontologies.
	The Information Retrieval subsystem will be extended with the possibility to draw freeware material also from non-Semantic Web relying on a classical keyword approach in order to be exploited immediately with the actual Web structure. Obviously material found in this way will have a limited pedagogical value but can be used as additional material uring training sessions.

Horizontal Objectives

To evaluate DIOGENE in lifelike experiments with real users inside and outside a real enterprise environment monitored by expert of training evaluation in order to assess the impact for the actors involved and to prove the added value of the new learning environment in terms of cost effectiveness, learning efficiency, flexibility in time and space and user satisfaction.

To sketch and evaluate a sustainable business model around the proposed solution in order to demonstrate the longer-term feasibility of the learning solution as part of a business offer. The model will involve not only the technology provider but also content provider organisations and free-lance teachers. An early business model exploiting this idea and pointing out comparative advantages will be outlined in section 8. Such model, will be extended and benchmarked during the project.

To disseminate research activities and results at international conferences and workshops. A project Web site (to support the training portal) will be created in order to provide information related to DIOGENE progresses and intermediate results.

     Objectives