The target groups of the ENN-ICS project are patients, medical doctors, general practitionars, nurses, general public. They all have specific information needs, different pre-knowlegde and different technical equipment available. Additionally, both users and authors of the ENN-ICS project are located in different countries.

The technical approach has to consider these circumstances and has thus to provide for easy to use interfaces, different areas according to the user groups and to ensure access independently from where the user is located.

That's why ENN-ICS employes an internet based approach having the WWW as the main user interface. The ENN-ICS website with the portal serve as central information point. The portal gives the flexibility to prepare user specific information and give users access only to the areas he or she is allowed to (e.g. courses of the Learning Management System). Extra services are incorporated within the web-site so that their origin is transparent to the user. This reduces complexity and have the user only deal with a single frontend - a web browser.

Providing content for the Learning Management System

The learning management system (LMS) provides courses to users tailored according to their needs and their pre-knowlegde which might be different between patients, nurses or GPs. International recognised experts will author the contents which requires a decentralised authoring system. However, the quality of the contents has to be assured and common guidelines and styleguides have to be followed while creating or adapting content. A centralised editor will take care of these issues and upload the contents of the different authors into the content management system. To enable reuse of contents in different courses the contents is stored in small blocks in the content management system. Creating a new course then means to arrange content blocks with matching learning goals and to bring them in a logical order.

Single Source - Multi Media

All the content stored in the content management system (CMS) can be used for different tasks. However, depending on the task the content may have to be transformed in a special format (XML, HTML, etc) or the contents needs to be pulished on different media. Irrespective of the form or media the underlying content is the same. That's why we follow the "single source multi media" approach.