A flexible scheme for representing and retrieving multimedia contents in computer-based educational systems

Computer-based educational systems are faced with an increasing range of challenges. The use of multimedia provides a number of technical and conceptual demands, the volume and nature of the material requires sophisticated knowledge representation techniques, and a continuously increasing level of interactivity between learner and system is desired. This paper suggests a concept for an advanced learning system which addresses these issues. The concept is based on the Flexible Structured Coding Language (FSCL), a natural-language-like formalised description language. A range of extensions regarding the use of ontologies, the inference of knowledge and the formulation of free-form queries based on FSCL are discussed.