Design of modular crystallographic lectures with XML based technologies.

Web based courses in crystallography have become quite common, these applications are mostly HTML- or PDF based. In these case we fi nd often that content, structure and presentation of these coursewares are lumped together.

The production of HTML- or PDF presentations can be done with standard scientific programs like Latex or Microsoft Word but sharing, reuse and modifi cation of these data is impeded. That means HTML and PDF based courses are a little bit infl exible and also devicedependent. Most of these crystallographic curses have an auditorium with variable educational background. As an example we may have crystallographic lectures that will be visit form geoscientists, physicists and from biologists so we need different lectures per the target group and a high degree of fl exibility and modularity in our teaching environment.

In order to achieve such a fl exibility, course modules can prepared in the Extensible Markup Language (XML), maintained in a repository and organized using metadata based on standards like ARIADNE [2]. Markup descriptions are usually device-independent. The devicedependent information is stored in a separate description called a stylesheet. The word "style" refers to the mapping between the markup tags and the semantics. There are several proposed standards for describing style information like XSL (Extensible Style sheet Language). The materials required for a course are generated as per the request in the desired formats (HTML for Internet-based learning material, PDF for printed manuscripts, PPT for slide presentations) by the content repository using XSL processing techniques. For further details and discussion please visit the project website.

Poster: PDF
Lecture: Internet basierende Lehre - Kristallographie mit OLAT (German)


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