A Web Services Broker for E-learning Judith Rodr´ ıguez, Luis Anido, Manuel J. Fern´ andez, Fernando Mikic, and Luis M. ´ Alv´ arez Departamento de Ingenier´ ıaTelem´atica Universidad de Vigo Campus Universitario s/n, E36200 Vigo (Spain) {jestevez,lanido,manolo,mikic,lmsabu}@det.uvigo.es Abstract. Brokerage enriches the traditional searching services to in- clude resource acquisition, distribution and billing and perfectly adapts to a scenario like e-learning where multiple, independent content providers and service providers exist. Brokerage offers a suitable frame- work where customers, mainly learners, can get in touch with providers. On the one hand, customers can locate, select and access the resources and services offered by providers in an efficient way. On the other hand, providers can benefit from services as marketing, customizable publiciz- ing, or even accounting and billing. This paper proposes a brokerage architecture for Web-based E-learning services. It facilitates the inte- gration of individual software components providing specific services to compose a complete E-learning environment. 1 Introduction The application of Internet technologies to the learning field is one of the most prolific research areas during the last years. There are many educational re- sources and software platforms available through the Web. In this situation, heterogeneous proprietary data models and platforms have coexisted for years. As a consequence an interoperability and integration problem came up. To over- come this situation, a standardization process for E-learning technologies started several years ago. This process has produced promising results and several pro- posals has already become de-facto standards among e-learning developers com- munity [1]. Most of these standards offer suitable data models to exchange and transfer information among heterogeneous systems. Nowadays, the trend among e-learning standardization community is to offer well-defined interfaces to access common services. For this, Web services are being widely used as the underlying support. The Web services concept has strongly emerged as a new distributed comput- ing paradigm that attempts to make use of existing Internet technology over- coming the drawbacks of other distributed technologies such as DCOM [2] or CORBA [3]. The E-learning field is also benefiting from this situation and sev- eral e-learning institutions and companies are planning to deliver their services using Web services technologies [4]. P.M.A. Sloot et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2003, LNCS 2657, pp. 659–668, 2003. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003