Towards a Corporate Semantic Web Approach in Designing Learning Systems. Review of the TRIAL SOLUTION Project Michel BUFFA*, Sylvain DEHORS**, Catherine FARON-ZUCKER*, Peter SANDER* *MAINLINE, I3S, UNSA 930 route des Colles, bât ESSI, BP 145, 06930 Sophia Antipolis cedex, France {buffa,faron,sander}@essi.fr **ACACIA, INRIA Sophia Antipolis 2004 route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis cedex, France Sylvain.Dehors@sophia.inria.fr Abstract. The TRIAL SOLUTION EU project focused on the publication of personalized electronic documents based on existing scientific books. Its general approach consists in slicing electronic books into elementary learning resources and annotating them with metadata enabling the retrieval of resources by a semantic search. The annotated resources are published into a repository available for teachers or students to produce personalised teaching or learning materials with delivery tools. In this paper we give an overview of the project, emphasizing the authoring tool we have developed to annotate the learning resources, and we review it by the light of the Semantic Web. Introduction TRIAL SOLUTION EU project 1 focuses on the publication of personalized electronic documents based on existing scientific books. Designing new electronic documents from scratch is very expensive and print-oriented authors rarely possess the required competency to perform such a specialized task. On the other hand, most recent regular printed books have a digital format, e.g. Latex or Microsoft Word, that can help in automating the publication of personalised electronic documents from printed books. The benefits of the approach based on re-engineering existing materials have been described in [1] and the process itself is detailed in [2]. This was the starting point of the TRIAL SOLUTION project. The general approach consists in slicing electronic books into elementary learning resources and re-engineering these resources by refining the slices and annotating the resources with metadata on : content, didactic features and interoperability interfacing; this in order to enable intelligent retrieval. The annotated resources are then published into an online repository available for teachers and students to produce personalised documents, or just to find relevant learning materials. The TRIAL SOLUTION platform integrates three main services: the automatic extraction and annotation of learning resources from electronic books, the re-engineering of the repository of learning resources and the retrieval of learning resources based on their annotations. Our contribution to the project is the authoring tool for re-engineering the learning resources by improving on their initial slicing and by adding metadata to them. In 1 TRIAL SOLUTION stands for Tools for Reusable, Integrated, Adaptable Learning - Systems/standards for Open Learning Using Tested, Interoperable Objects and Networking It was funded by the EU as part of the IST Program within the EU's Fifth RTD Framework Program. http://www.trial-solution.de/