Standard and ontologies perspectives in building and planning learning future

Recent developments in ICT offer more opportunties to improve and widen communications with an obvious impact on E-learning methods and the distribution of educational content. E-learning represents a new concept of education and leads to a common standard to implement interoperability and to share resources. Teachers and students do not have to learn the use of different platforms, thus saving time, money and hard work. Moreover, it is more complex to manage different platforms than a single one. Finally, the adoption of such a standard allows economy of scale by allowing teachers to share contents created with different authoring systems. ADL Scorm is the more credited standard allowing the teacher to interact with other material from an existing course. Along this line of integrating services, it emerges the innovative role of the Semantic Web, which aims to make web-based information services universally understandable and reusable. E-learning standards and the semantic web are strictly related, because they both aim to share and reuse information through the web. Moreover, since ontologies are a significative component of the Semantic Web, both of them will influence the development of new generation elearning systems. At the University of Milano are experimenting both concepts while accomplishing the new version of WEBCEN, www.webcen.unimi.it, an in-house educational environment that manages the four Undergraduat Curricula offered in the Information Technology Area