Research Of Educational Resource Discovery In Grid Environment

The 21st century is the great time that the humanity enters information society comprehensively, the informatization and digitalization of education is also developing in depth, and various educational resources will be increasing in number, and will be growing exponentially. However, the following common issues exist in the current educational resources building: the lack of excellent resources, dispersed storage, the lack of cooperation within a wide range of resources; the imperfection of Distance Education Standards, the presence of heterogeneous structures in the networks; the inability of sharing educational resources within large scope, the low utilization rate, the serious problem of duplication development; the low intelligence level of resources retrieval techniques; the slow access, applications and updating of the resources, the poor dynamic adaptability and so on. The main problem underlying is the ineffective sharing of resources.The invention of Grid technology, given that the essence of grid is comprehensive resource sharing, makes the sharing of resources with full realization possible. Grid has a lot of useful features which have broad applications in the field of education: sharable, dynamic, heterogeneous, superior computing performance, and outstanding service support. The Grid technology has eliminated the drawbacks of traditional ways of sharing resources, and enabled comprehensive sharing of educational resources and full accessibility to heterogeneous system interoperability. Grid has given a new meaning to the concept of "services", to provide on-demand services to learners.The registration and discovery of Educational resources are the core and foundation of the effective educational resources sharing. Without the registration and discovery of educational resources, none of the other applications can be possible. This paper gives a brief description on the definition and features of the grid technology, discusses respectively the three popular standards of resource metadata descriptions, and proposes an improved educational resources metadata description. Based on the mechanism already known, a new way of resources registration and discovery which is based on levels is presented. Finally, this paper presents the algorithm on resources registration and discovery, and runs the simulation tests using GridSim.