1.

The USA Department of Defense and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative in November 1997. The ADL will leverage ongoing work by related groups through partnership arrangements in academia, the commercial sector, and government. ADLNet is the virtual forum for collaboration, with tools like discussion forums, calendars, document repositories, and more. The ADL Strategy: to Promote widespread collaboration; Exploit Internet technologies; Develop next generation learning technologies; Create reusable content, and lower costs, with object-based tools. The purpose of the ADL initiative is to ensure access to high-quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs and can be made available whenever and wherever they are required. This initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce in the 21st century. It will do this through the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based learning that will foster the creation of re-usable learning content as

2.

ANSI promotes the use of U.S. standards internationally, advocates U.S. policy and technical positions in international and regional standards organizations, and enourages the adoption of international standards as national standards where these meet the needs of the user community.

3.

The ARIADNE Foundation was created to exploit and further develop the results of the ARIADNE and ARIADNE II European Projects, which created tools and methodologies for producing, managing and reusing computer-based pedagogical elements and telematics supported training curricula. Validation of the tools and concepts took place in various academic and corporate sites across Europe and was encouraging enough to go ahead with this idea of non-commercial exploitation: The underlying results stemm from a huge R&D effort (approximatively 100 man years invested in the two phases of the EU Project, ended in June 2000, much of which supported financially by the European Union and the Swiss Government). Continued maintenance and training in the use of ARIADNE's best tools, as well as their further development will consolidate and augment the Users Community that emerged around some simple ideas and common ideals.

4.

auDA was formed in April 1999 as the industry self-regulatory body for the .au namespace (Internet domains that end in .au). auDA is a non-profit company.

5.

Terms of reference, constitution, membership, minutes of meetings of the joint National Library of Australia (NLA)/Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Australian Committee on Cataloguing.

6.

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) fosters the efficient and effective use of ICT by Australian Government departments and agencies. It provides strategic advice, activities and representation relating to the application of ICT to government administration, information and services. The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) supersedes in part the former National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE).

7.

Founded in 1901, BSI Group is a leading business services provider to organisations worldwide. The Group has over 2,100 employees and has clients in over 100 countries. The Group provides: independent certification of management systems and products; product testing services; the development of private, national and international standards; performance management software solutions; management systems training and information on standards and international trade.

8.

CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, was founded in 1961 by the national standards bodies in the European Economic Community and EFTA countries. Now CEN is contributing to the objectives of the European Union and European Economic Area with voluntary technical standards which promote free trade, the safety of workers and consumers, interoperability of networks, environmental protection, exploitation of research and development programmes, and public procurement.

9.

CETIS represents UK higher-education and further-education institutions on international learning technology standards intiatives. The site explains what learning technology standards are, why these standards are important, who is involved and what products are supporting standards. There is also a reference section which seeks to define some of the terms used in learning technology such as ADL, IMS, CP, IEEE, LOM,SCORM, and interoperability.

10.

The central objective of the CORES project is to encourage the sharing of metadata semantics. The website includes a Standards Interoperability Forum which brings together key figures to discuss the practicalities of cross-standard interoperability; and a registry of core vocabularies and profiles.