Abstract

Major issues in the domain of education are, on one hand, the authorship of learning documents and, on the other hand, their pertinent representation, deployment and retrieval through the Web. Common practices to meet basic needs rely on using Learning Management Systems. However, we argue that content authored from these platforms are not pedagogical documents; there is a lack of semantic perspective in order to render learning materials meaningful, discoverable, sharable and exchangeable. Our research proposes an approach to structuring pedagogical documents for hypermedia environments. Our perspective confers priority to Structure First rather than Data First models. We introduce our prototype Web-based tool called SPECS, developed at Laboratoire Paragraphe, University of Paris VIII, which is aimed to assist knowledge workers to interact with semantic pedagogical documents. Finally, we present first user experiences and further work.