Educational resources search based on metadata expanded semantically

With the increase of the amounts of educational resources, it has become an important research issue to provide users with effective service of educational resources search. Unfortunately, traditional information retrieval cannot answer the challenge of the issue, on account of the complex characters of educational resources, such as vast character, distributed character and heterogeneous character. Grid technology aims to integrate the various resources into a homogenous presentation, and to share vast, heterogeneous and distributed resources. Furthermore, metadata specification of educational resources is becoming mature. Thus technology of grid resources search based on metadata can be utilized to solve the problem of educational resources search. Different from other resource locating methods based on metadata, expanded metadata are introduced into resource retrieval, which can improve the performance of resource search, but also achieve associational retrieval. Now a prototype of educational resources search system has already been developed and has been tested on the XJTU educational resource databases. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can achieve and improve the accuracy and efficiency of educational resource search.