An interoperability infrastructure for distributed feed networks

Abstract

Blogs have the affordance to become an integral part of teaching and learning processes as a vehicle for knowledge management. Open, flexible systems integrating blogs provide user-friendly, personalised microlearning environments while ensuring ubiquitous access. This paper concentrates on blog interoperability in an open space for learning and collaboration. As blogging is one of the most popular web-based forms of publishing today, there is a plethora of different blogging tools, feed readers, and aggregators, enabling information dissemination, filtering, and retrieval. Several different data structure and interaction standards emerged which make integration a real challenge. This paper aims at creating distributed microlearning environments basing on networks of integrated blogs, discusses problems of such an integration along with possible solutions, and proposes an architecture for loosely-coupled blog integration. The core of this infrastructure consists of a service interface for feed management that allows learners as well as facilitators to automatically set up channel structures for feed syndication, while effectively reducing the management efforts thereof through proper system support.