An elearning Platform based on Electronic Content Unit (ECU) * Carmine CESARANO, Angelo CHIANESE, Antonio PICARIELLO, Livia SOLIMENE Universit` a di Napoli ”Federico II” (carmine.cesarano,angchian,picus,lsolimen)@unina.it Abstract In this paper we propose an elearning plat- form based on a novel methodology for the description and virtual sharing of multimen- dia contents. The basic idea is the concept of eContent unit (ecu ). An ecu is the primitive object that captures one multimedia infor- mation as well as its semantic content, thus exporting media, metadata and methods for connecting other semantically similar ecu. 1 Introduction With the advent of new technologies and World Wide Web, enormous quantities of informa- tive material are nowadays available on-line. For such reason, computers are increasingly changing from computing systems to portals which permit to access big volumes of data both to communicate and to make commer- cial transactions [2] [3]. Thanks to the convergence of services of- fered by telecommunication companies, me- dia broadcasting and information science, i.e. the set of technologies that are the basis of the Information and Communication Tech- nology, the future will be more and more characterized by the ability to provide mul- timedia information. On the other hand, it has been largely recognized in the literature that the commercial success of an enterprise * This work has been carried out partially under the financial support of the Ministero dell’Istruzione,dell’Universit e della Ricerca (MIUR) in the framework of the FIRB Project ”Middleware for advanced services over large-scale, wired-wireless distributed systems (WEB-MINDS)” on the Web depends on handling informa- tion easily to fetch and distribute in a format that is well suited to the end-user demands. To this purpose, the concept of informative content in electronic format (eContent), ex- tended to many kind of information - textual, video, audio and graphical - is increasingly applied in several productivity sectors. At this level of abstraction, the eContent is the object that must be handled during the life cycle of a multimedia product, from the be- ginning idea and creation, to the installation within an application and the delivery to an end-user, comprehensive of the closure phase and eventual destruction. What is clear from previous experiences documented in litera- ture is the need of a management system, i.e. an eContent management, to automatically handle, user friendly and efficiently a great amount of different kind of information.The increasing use of the Internet and the contin- uous comparison among the members of the eBook industry from various countries, pro- vide the reasons for a fast change of the ed- itorial field. In general, publications are be- coming themselves information portals, com- plex data bases in which format and edition type are both a component and a function of the offered service. The advantages of such a transformation will be visible in the complete life cycle of a publication, from the authors to the readers involving editors, distributors and, of course, book sellers which, beside the reinforcement of their role in preserving and diffusing information, will be able to control the increasing complexity of the data and to provide an easy and efficient access to them. In the near future it will be possible to reach a number of goals, such as shorter publica- 1