A generic E-Learning engineering framework embracing the Semantic Web

E-Learning has become a serious discipline in IT supported management with the aim of enabling life-long learning. Unfortunately, E-Learning is a bottom-up based technical approach and the vision of life-long learning is, not yet reached, because it demands the existence of resource pools as a basis enabling cross referencing of topics, skills and all other resources within an organizational memory. Fortunately, new technologies coming from the Semantic Web and Web-Services communities will be able to overcome some of the hindering technical obstacles providing interoperability between different platforms and programming paradigms so that resources can be personalized and presented on arbitrary clients. This paper embraces these technologies and presents a generic E-Learning Engineering approach that fits them into a top-down IT-supported management framework so that business goals may be transformed into a technical environment. Furthermore, this approach also sets grounds for closing the gap to E-Business (e.g. Performance Management like the Balanced Scorecard).