GRAPP&S, a Peer-to-Peer Middleware for Interlinking and Sharing Educational Resources

Abstract

This article presents GRAPP&S (Grid APPlication & Services), a specification of an E-learning architecture for the decentralized sharing of educational resources. By dealing with different resources such as files, data streams (video, audio, VoIP), queries on databases but also access to remote services (web services on a server, on a cloud, etc.), GRAPP&S groups the resources of each institution in the form of a community and allows sharing among different communities. Educational resources are managed on a transparent manner through proxies specific to each type of resources. The transparency provided by proxies concerns the location of sources of educational data, the processing of queries, the composition of the results and the management of educational data consistency. Furthermore, the architecture of GRAPP&S has been designed to allow security policies for data protection, both within a community and between different communities.