Services for knowledge resource sharing & management in an open source infrastructure for lifelong competence development

Access to learning information is still restricted due to the lack of technical and semantic interoperability, locking knowledge resources in disconnected islands. This situation does not provide learners with a motivating environment in which to access and share learning information. In order to target emerging needs for lifelong competence development, a flexible and open source environment for management and sharing of knowledge resources must be built on top of an infrastructure that maximizes the amount of information available, therefore integrating centralised repositories and user desktop resources as well as emergent Web 2.0 applications. This paper describes the challenges and requirements that need to be addressed and presents a set of interfaces and our current implementation of the Knowledge Resource Sharing and Management service oriented architecture.