Abstract
The main goal of recommender systems is to assist users in finding items of their interest in very large collections. The use of good automatic recommendation promotes customer loyalty and user satisfaction because it helps users to attain their goals. Current methods focus on the immediate value of recommendations and are evaluated as such. This is insufficient for long term goals, either defined by users or by platform managers. This is of interest in recommending learning resources to learn a target concept, and also when a company is organizing a campaign to lead users to buy certain products or moving to a different customer segment. Therefore, we believe that it would be useful to develop recommendation algorithms that promote the goals of users and platform managers (e.g. e-shop manager, e-learning tutor, ministry of culture promotor). Accordingly, we must define appropriate evaluation methodologies and demonstrate the concept on practical cases.

Abstract
Existing gamification services have features that preclude their use by e-learning tools. Odin is a gamification service that mimics the API of state-of-the-art services without these limitations. This paper describes Odin, its role in an e-learning system architecture requiring gamification, and details its implementation. The validation of Odin involved the creation of a small e-learning game, integrated in a Learning Management System (LMS) using the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification.

Abstract
There are two main types of semantic measures (SM): similarity and relatedness. There are also two main types of datasets, those intended for similarity evaluations and those intended for relatedness. Although they are clearly distinct, they are similar enough to generate some misconceptions. Is there a confusion between similarity and relatedness among the semantic measure community, both the designers of SMs and the creators of benchmarks? This is the question that the research presented in this paper tries to answer. Authors performed a survey of both the SMs and datasets and executed a cross evaluation of those measures and datasets. The results show different consistency of measures with datasets of the same type. This research enabled us to conclude not only that there is indeed some confusion but also to pinpoint the SMs and benchmarks less consistent with their intended type.

Abstract
Nowadays, a large number of people consume music from the web. Web sites and online services now typically contain millions of music tracks, which complicates search, retrieval, and discovery of music. Music recommender systems can address these issues by recommending relevant and novel music to a user based on personal musical tastes. In this paper, we propose a hybrid music recommender system, which combines usage and content data. We describe an online evaluation experiment performed in real-time on a commercial web site, specialized in content from the very Long Tail of music content. We compare it against two stand-alone recommender systems, the first system based on usage and the second one based on content data (namely, audio and textual tags). The results show that the proposed hybrid recommender shows advantages with respect to usage-based and content-based systems, namely, higher user absolute acceptance rate, higher user activity rate and higher user loyalty. © 2012, Springer-Verlag London.

Abstract
A repository of learning objects is a system that stores electronic resources in a technology-mediated learning process. The need for this kind of repository is growing as more educators become eager to use digital educational contents and more of it becomes available. The sharing and use of these resources relies on the use of content and communication standards as a means to describe and exchange educational resources, commonly known as learning objects. This paper presents the design and implementation of a service-oriented repository of learning objects called crimsonHex. This repository supports new definitions of learning objects for specialized domains and we illustrate this feature with the definition of programming exercises as learning objects and its validation by the repository. The repository is also fully compliant with existing communication standards and we propose extensions by adding new functions, formalizing message interchange and providing a REST interface. To validate the interoperability features of the repository, we developed a repository plug-in for Moodle that is expected to be included in the next release of this popular learning management system. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract
Several standards have appeared in recent years to formalize the metadata of learning objects, but they are still insufficient to fully describe a specialized domain. In particular, the programming exercise domain requires interdependent resources (e. g. test cases, solution programs, exercise description) usually processed by different services in the programming exercise lifecycle. Moreover, the manual creation of these resources is time-consuming and error-prone, leading to an obstacle to the fast development of programming exercises of good quality. This chapter focuses on the definition of an XML dialect called PExIL (Programming Exercises Interoperability Language). The aim of PExIL is to consolidate all the data required in the programming exercise lifecycle from when it is created to when it is graded, covering also the resolution, the evaluation, and the feedback. The authors introduce the XML Schema used to formalize the relevant data of the programming exercise lifecycle. The validation of this approach is made through the evaluation of the usefulness and expressiveness of the PExIL definition. In the former, the authors present the tools that consume the PExIL definition to automatically generate the specialized resources. In the latter, they use the PExIL definition to capture all the constraints of a set of programming exercises stored in a learning objects repository. Copyright (C) 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.