FIRE/LRE: The EUN Learning Resource Exchange
(formerly Federation of Internet Resources for Education)

What is FIRE/LRE ?

• Lighting the FIRE for federating the search of learning resources: A presentation of FIRE by Riina Vuorikari.
• A more technical description of the LRE.

Related Events

• SE@M'08: Second International Workshop on Search and Exchange of e-le@rning Materials (Formerly Learning Object Discovery & Exchange - LODE) - Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 2008.
• LODE'07: The First International Workshop on Learning Object Discovery & Exchange. September 18, Crete, Greece.
• 2nd Learning Resource Exchange Developer Workshop - June 11-13, 2007, Brussels, Belgium.

Technical Documentation

• How to light FIRE: The FIRE/LRE technical documentation (under construction).
• Learning Resource Exchange: A Developer Perspective: A powerpoint presentation describing the FIRE/LRE APIs necessary to connect to the federation.
• Cerberus Configuration: A powerpoint presentation describing the security aspects of the FIRE/LRE.

Developer Resources

• The Match Box (version 3.1.0 for Java 1.5 - August 25, 2008): A package containing the java libraries necessary to connect a system to the FIRE/LRE version 3.
• The FIRE/LRE XML Bindings

Test instance (default)

• Prefix: calibrate
• URL: http://stove.test.eun.org:8080/
• Suffix: dc=eun,dc=org
• Get access to the test instance of the federation: An S2QL interface to search the federation.
• The LRE Query Watcher: A web page that displays the queries received by the test instance of the STOVE.
• The LIMBS administration tools: Lists the spark ids of the learning systems currently connected to the test instance of the federation. (Restricted Access).

Production instance

• Prefix: calibrate
• URL: http://lrecoreprod.eun.org:8080/
• Suffix: dc=eun,dc=org
• Get access to the production instance of the federation: An S2QL interface to search the real federation.
• The LRE Query Watcher: A web page that displays the queries received by the production instance of the STOVE.
• The LIMBS administration tools: Lists the spark ids of the learning systems currently connected to the production instance of the federation. (Restricted Access).

Related Projects

• ASPECT
• MELT
• CALIBRATE
• eMapps.com and MINOR (an open-source learning resource repository)
• CELEBRATE

Background Information

About Brokerage Systems and Architectures

• A discussion about the limitations of the CELEBRATE approach:
  D. Massart. CELEBRATE's Lessons. In Proceedings of the Workshop on What Went Wrong with Technology Enhanced Learning, pages 1-7, Crete, Greece, October 2006. [pdf]
  
• A description of LIMBS, the brokerage system on which FIRE/LRE is based:
  J.-N. Colin and D. Massart. LIMBS: Open source, open standards, and open content to foster learning resource exchanges. In Kinshuk, R. Koper, P. Kommers, P. Kirschner, D. Sampson, and W. Didderen, editors, Proc. of The Sixth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT'06, pages 682-686, Kerkrade, The Netherlands, July 2006. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, California. [pdf]
  
• The limbs home page.

About Queries and Query Services

• IMS Query Services White Paper- Version 1.

  The LRE Query Language (LRE-QL)

  • LRE-QL Specification.
  • A parser (lex and yacc) for LRE-QL v1.0.

About Metadata

• IEEE LOM standard
• The IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard.
• The IEEE LOM XML binding.
• Examples of descriptions of a learning asset and a learning resource using the IEEE LOM XML binding.
• LRE LOM Application Profile v3.0
• Information model (final).
• A graphical representation of the LRE APv3.0 information model.
• The LRE LOM XML Binding.
• Examples of descriptions of a learning asset and a learning resource using the LRE application profile and its XML binding.
• The MELT application profile v1.1.2 is a profile of the LRE AP v3.0 that is used by the MELT project. Since the MELT AP only add constraints that are compatible with the LRE profile, each valid instance of the MELT AP is a valid instance of the LRE AP (the contrary is not necessary true). Therefore MELT metadata can be expressed with the LRE binding.
• LRE Thesaurus
• An html form to browse the LRE Thesaurus.
• A XVD (XML) version of the LRE Thesaurus. A description of the XVD format is available here.
• An alphabetic list of the LRE thesaurus descriptors (in English) with their numeric values.
• Curriculum Mapping:
  When mapping to resources one should map one action verb together with at least one topic term. The topic term can either be from the Science vocabulary or the Mathematics vocabulary.
• "Linking Learning Resources to Curricula by using Competencies". A paper by Frans Van Assche describing the LRE curriculum mapping approach.
• Action verbs in ZTHES format.
• Topics:
• Mathematics (version Sept. 10, 2007) in ZTHES format.
• Science (version Sept. 10, 2007) in ZTHES format.
• MALT: A prototype of a REST-based automatic LOM translator.

About SQI

• Simple Query Interface Specification: CEN Workshop Agreement #15454 (Nov. 2005).
• A simple query interface for interoperable learning repositories: A presentation of SQI at the WWW*05 Workshop on Interoperability of Web-Based Educational Systems.
• The SQI Wiki.
• "Binding the Simple Query Interface". A paper by Nhu Van Nguyen and David Massart discussing the best ways to bind the SQI specification.