Many educational and training institutions acquired
proprietary e-Learning systems which are tailored-made and
difficult to reuse in the development process of new systems. This
paper aims to look into the issue of reusability of the
functionalities in the e-Learning domain. The functionalities that
span across many e-Learning systems (common functionalities)
can be built as reusable components by using Web services and
the implementation of these services enables the reuse of the
functionalities . A pool of e-Learning Web services is built and
allows to provide functionalities to the various e-learning systems.
These e-learning Web services are described by using an ontology
which takes into account the functionalities’ characteristics of elearning
platforms. The aim is to allow developers to find them
automatically. Following that, instead of building from scratch,
the development of future e-Learning systems will involve
assembling the suitable functionalities from Web services’
set related to e-Learning. This will tremendously reduce the time,
effort and cost needed in building new e-Learning systems.