Abstract
eLearning has been evolved in a gradual and consistent way. Along with this evolution several specialized and disparate systems appeared to fulfill the needs of teachers and students such as repositories of learning objects, intelligent tutors, or automatic evaluators. This heterogeneity poses issues that are necessary to address in order to promote interoperability among systems. Based on this fact, the standardization of content takes a leading role in the eLearning realm. This article presents a survey on current eLearning content standards. It gathers information on the most emergent standards and categorizes them according three distinct facets: metadata, content packaging and educational design. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.

Abstract
Extracting the semantic relatedness of terms is an important topic in several areas, including data mining, information retrieval and web recommendation. This paper presents an approach for computing the semantic relatedness of terns in RDF graphs based on the notion of proximity. It proposes a formal definition of proximity in terms of the set paths connecting two concept nodes, and an algorithm for finding this set and computing proximity with a given error margin. This algorithm was implemented on a tool called Shakti that extracts relevant ontological data for a given domain from DBpedia - a community effort to extract structured data from the Wikipedia. To validate the proposed approach Shakti was used to recommend web pages on a Portuguese social site related to alternative music and the results of that experiment are also reported.

Abstract

Abstract
Experiments on cognitive processes require a detailed analysis of the contribution of many participants. In the case of cognitive processes in writing, these experiments require special software tools to collect gestures performed with a pen or a stylus, and recorded with special hardware. These tools produce different kinds of data files in binary and proprietary formats that need to be managed on a workstation file system for further processing with generic tools, such as spreadsheets and statistical analysis software. The lack of common formats and open repositories hinders the possibility of distributing the workload among researchers within the research group, of re-processing the collected data with software developed by other research groups, and of sharing results with the rest of the cognitive processes research community. This paper describes the development of Hand Spy, a collaborative environment for managing experiments in the cognitive processes in writing. This environment was designed to cover all the stages of the experiment, from the definition of tasks to be performed by participants, to the synthesis of results. Collaboration in Hand Spy is enabled by a rich web interface. To decouple the environment from existing hardware devices for collecting written production, namely digitizing tablets and smart pens, Hand Spy is based on the InkML standard, an XML data format for representing digital ink. This design choice shaped many of the features in Hand Spy, such as the use of an XML database for managing application data and the use of XML transformations. XML transformations convert between persistent data representations used for storage and transient data representations required by the widgets on the user interface. Despite being a system independent from a specific collecting device, for the system validation, a framework for data collection was created. This framework has also been highlighted in the paper due to the important role it took in a data collection process, of a scientific project to study the cognitive processes involved in writing.

Abstract
In the last two decades, there was a proliferation of programming exercise formats that hinders interoperability in automatic assessment. In the lack of a widely accepted standard, a pragmatic solution is to convert content among the existing formats. BabeLO is a programming exercise converter providing services to a network of heterogeneous e-learning systems such as contest management systems, programming exercise authoring tools, evaluation engines and repositories of learning objects. Its main feature is the use of a pivotal format to achieve greater extensibility. This approach simplifies the extension to other formats, just requiring the conversion to and from the pivotal format. This paper starts with an analysis of programming exercise formats representative of the existing diversity. This analysis sets the context for the proposed approach to exercise conversion and to the description of the pivotal data format. The abstract service definition is the basis for the design of BabeLO, its components and web service interface. This paper includes a report on the use of BabeLO in two concrete scenarios: to relocate exercises to a different repository, and to use an evaluation engine in a network of heterogeneous systems.

Abstract
We present an application of constraint logic programming to create multiple-choice questions for math quizzes. Constraints are used for the configuration of the generator, giving the user some flexibility to customize the forms of the expressions arising in the exercises. Constraints are also used to control the application of the buggy rules in the derivation of plausible wrong solutions to the quiz questions. We developed a prototype based on the core system of AGILMAT [18]. For delivering math quizzes to students, we used an automatic evaluation feature of Mooshak [8] that was improved to handle math expressions. The communication between the two systems - AgilmatQuiz and Mooshak - relies on a specially designed LATEX based quiz format. This tool is being used at our institution to create quizzes to support assessment in a PreCalculus course for first year undergraduate students.