A QoS-aware network supporting an E-learning framework

Distance Learning has largely benefited from the incredible progress that internetworking technologies have made in the last years. The provision of multimedia services with guaranteed QoS is currently an important research issue in computer engineering, especially in the networking and information management areas. In this paper, we present an Italian research structure (ITEM — CINI of Naples) created to grant remote access to real laboratories and to provide distance learning services such as discovery and delivery of multimedia resources in the educational application domain. In the first part of the paper we present the structure and the activities of the ITEM laboratory and in the second part, metadata models for Quality of Software (QoS)-aware information management systems are presented.