D.: An Intelligent Educational Metadata Repository. Accepted for publication at

Recently, several standardization efforts for e-learning technologies gave rise to various specifications for educational metadata, that is, data describing all the "entities " involved in an educational procedure. The internal details of systems that utilize these metadata are still an open issue since these efforts are primarily dealing with "what " and not "how". In this chapter, under the light of these emerging standardization efforts, we present X-DEVICE, an intelligent XML repository system for educational metadata. X-DEVICE can be used as the intelligent back-end of a WWW portal on which "learning objects " are supplied by educational service providers and accessed by learners according to their individual profiles and educational needs. X-DEVICE transforms the widely adopted XML binding for educational metadata into a flexible, object-oriented representation and uses intelligent second-order logic querying facilities to provide advanced, personalized functionality. Furthermore, a case study is presented, in which learning object metadata and learner's profile metadata are combined under certain X-DEVICE rules in order to dynamically infe