Design and implementation of an exploratory search system with cloud computing techniques

Medical academic institutions and medical professional societies alike are increasingly required to invest in external overspecialised expertise in order to enrich their curricula and/or their educational material by developing overspecialized courses and corresponding educational content. Such content must be easily discovered, retrieved, re-used and thus shared across institutions and among medical teachers and students (undergraduate and professionals alike). mEducator, a European project funded under the eContentplus programme, and of which the University of Catania is partner, wants to enable specialized educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared and re-used. Anyway, to find interesting stuff that could be shared and re-used, it's possible to adopt some techniques which allow to improve the search system, for example the implementation of an exploratory search system. Therefore the aim of this M.S. thesis is the design and implementation of an exploratory search system in mEducator, which could allow to exploit the base system of "focused search" and to expand then the search towards results that aren't completely inherent to the specified criteria, but that could be of interest, because they are tied through deeper connections (re-purposing, same tags inserted by users, same words in the descriptions, etc.).
Chapter 2 deals with all the main and introductory topics, useful to understand what we will talk about in next chapters: the topics will be mEducator, the learning object/resource, the exploratory search, the Self Organizing Maps and the Cloud computing. In chapter 3 I will analyze what was the current state of mEducator, the website MetaMorphosis and the work that was possible to do on it in order to add new functionalities concerning exploratory search. The following chapter, 4, will explain how the work theorized in chapter 3 has been implemented. There was also space for improvements and adjustments, described in chapter 5. The two appendices will give further information respectively on the structure of our internal cloud and on how to install the developed functionalities on MetaMorphosis.