Ariadne is a Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an association for sharing knowledge and fostering international cooperation in teaching that is open to the world.

Ariadne was initiated in 1996 by the European Commission

European Commission

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....

's telematics for education and training program. Since then, an infrastructure has been developed in Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

 and Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 for the production of reusable learning content, including distributed storage and discovery, as well as its exploitation in structured courses. The core of this infrastructure is a distributed library of digital, reusable educational components called the Knowledge Pool System (KPS) now actively used in both academic and corporate contexts.

End users interact with the KPS through client tools. Java and web applications allow users to insert documents and their associated metadata into the KPS, search for relevant documents, and download them from the KPS. Java applications interact with the KPS through the ARIADNE Web Services. The ARIADNE Web Service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

s provide an API that hides the database access details and also enables interoperability with other repositories.

The ARIADNE toolset contains the following components:

• The ARIADNE KPS Client
• SILO, the current Indexation- and Query tool for learning objects
  Learning object
  A learning object is "a collection of content items, practice items, and assessment items that are combined based on a single learning objective". The term is credited to Wayne Hogins when he created a working group in 1994 bearing the name though the concept was first described by Gerard in 1967...
  
  
• AMG, a component that leverages existing libraries for automatic metadata generation
• A LOM
  Learning object metadata
  Learning Object Metadata is a data model, usually encoded in XML, used to describe a learning object and similar digital resources used to support learning...
  
   based Federated search
  Federated search
  Federated search is an information retrieval technology that allows the simultaneous search of multiple searchable resources. A user makes a single query request which is distributed to the search engines participating in the federation...
  
  engine, that dynamically searches other (more learning technology oriented) search systems like Lionshare, Merlot, Edna, NIME, etc.