A New E-Book Developing Paradigm

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are software systems that implementing different e-learning
scenarios in practice. In the simplest case, Learning Management System can be seen as a structured
repository of courseware materials provided with additional communication facilities such as
discussion forum, annotations, chats, etc. Courseware is structured as so-called E-Learning courses -
repositories that serve one particular training course. A significant part of courseware materials
available from such E-learning course are so-called E-Books. E-Book is a structured collection of plain
HTML documents and self-assessment questions. Normally, E-Books are authored by means of socalled
free-hand authoring - documents are encoded in a form of Hypertext Mark-Up Language
(HTML) files; an overall E-Book structure is defined as a collection of hyperlinks - references to other
the documents. Such "spaghetti" link structure has a number of disadvantages from the perspective of
collaborative authoring, browsing and reuse of the courseware.
This paper proposes a novel method of structuring E-Books suitable for evolutionary, collaborative
development of courseware. The method is based on the concept of so-called structured collection (SCollections).
An S-Collection is an opaque container that encapsulates a set of HTML documents and
a particular navigable structure. S-Collections are main building blocks of an E-Book. S-Collections
may encapsulate other S-Collections as members. Developing of an E-Book can be seen as authoring
HTML documents, combining the documents into S-Collections and memberwise inclusion of SCollections
into other S-Collections as opposed to spaghetti linking of nodes in other models
Editing operations are addressed to a particular data object (S-collection) and do not affect the link
structure of other objects. This object-oriented character of the model presents new ways of
supporting the logical integrity of complex E-Books.