itec - European Schoolnet

iTEC Project
Title: ITEC-D10_2_V1-1 041102012.Docx
Finally, Section 1.3 describes how the SDE’s technological components are internally organized.
Here we aimed to provide a general overview of the final implementation, the technologies used,
and the way they are orchestrated to meet the requirements identified in the Reference
Architecture D10.1, Section 4 (Anido, Santos, Caeiro, Míguez, Cañas, & Fernández, 2011).
Figure 3. Relations between SDE and information sources
1.1. SDE Application Programming Interface (API)
One of the main outcomes of WP10 is the provision of services to facilitate for other components
the selection of the tools, people and events most suitable to support a given Learning Activity.
According to the current iTEC technical architecture (Massart, 2012), the Composer will be the
main client of this service. It will improve the final experience of teachers when configuring shells
and selecting resources by putting together SDE services under a basic structure. Formerly,
teachers performed these tasks with no further assistance. Now, an intelligent assistant offers
recommendations on resources taking into account available technologies in the school and
teachers’ knowledge and skills.
This section is aimed at introducing the features of the SDE API, which is one of the main
outcomes of WP10 during the second year of the Project. We provide an overall description,
omitting most technical details. We focus on how SDE API methods are used to extend the
functionality offered by the Composer and to offer new value-added services to the final user.
Section 1.1.1 briefly describes the behaviour of each of the methods provided. Section 1.1.2
includes a brief description of the supporting technology and communication protocols. Finally,
Section 1.1.3 introduces some examples of the usage of SDE services based on common
scenarios. The full documentation of the SDE API is available in Appendix III.
1.1.1. SDE API Methods Description
Each of the methods provided by the SDE API is briefly discussed below. Each method is
introduced according to a basic structure including: method name; description; input parameters;
and result.
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