Knowledge Resources Management and Sharing in the TENCompetence Project

One of the most relevant activities in the EU TENCompetence project is directed at the development of models and tools to stimulate the sharing and management of knowledge resources. Knowledge resources are the containers that store the explicit knowledge for sharing purposes. Examples are learning objects, articles, books, software programs, informal messages, etc. From the technical perspective the main outcome of this part of the research in TENCompetence is to develop an infrastructure suitable to provide users with functionalities for the creation, storage in distributed, federated digital repositories, search, support, retrieval, packaging, reuse, sharing and quality rating of knowledge resources. Moreover, in order to guarantee a high degree of interoperability, each knowledge resource must be both packaged according to existing specifications (e.g. IMS-CP and SCORM) and uniquely identifiable using worldwide unique identifiers and metadata descriptors (e.g. LOM or Dublin Core format). This paper is an overview on the objectives, issues and potential technical solutions identified in the initial phase of the project.