Development of a National Syllabus Repository for Higher Education in Ireland

With the significant growth in electronic education materials such as syllabus documents and lecture notes available on the Internet and intranets, there is a need for developing structured central repositories of such materials to allow both educators and learners to easily share, search and access them. This paper reports on our on-going work to develop a national repository for course syllabi in Ireland. In specific, it describes a prototype syllabus repository system for higher education in Ireland that has been developed by utilising a number of information extraction and document classification techniques, including a new fully unsupervised document classification method that uses a web search engine for automatic collection of training set for the classification algorithm. Preliminary experimental results for evaluating the system's performance are presented and discussed.