TM4L: Creating and browsing educational topic maps

In this article, we describe TM4L, an environment for building, maintaining and using standards‐based, ontology‐aware e‐learning repositories. It is based on the idea that concept‐driven access to learning material implemented as a topic map can bridge the gap between a learner and targeted knowledge. One of the driving goals of this work is to increase the reusability of available educational resources by enabling the use of a developed subject ontology with courses on the same subject with different stricture. Another goal of TM4L is to support an efficient context‐based retrieval of learning content tailored to the needs of a learner working on an educational task. The paper focuses on three aspects of the TM4L environment: domain modelling, editing capabilities and the interface for exploring the learning collection. The key features of the TM4L functionality are illustrated with some examples.