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E-learning deals with knowledge management, for sure, and knowledge management very frequently results in learning. So far, there is an obviously close relationship between the two disciplines. However, deeper insights do not arise easily. Here we investigate how one approach to enhancing information-access interfaces may inspire an improvement in knowledge management for e-learning. Subjunctive interfaces support users in investigating and visualizing information obtained in parallel through multiple enquiries. A wide spectrum of exploratory e-learning approaches may benefit from adopting and adapting the subjunctive interface concept.

Although Web technologies enabled us to publish and to browse intellectual resources, they do not enable people to reedit and redistribute intellectual resources, including not only documents but also tools and services, published in the Web. Meme media technologies were proposed to solve this problem, and to accelerate the evolution of intellectual resources accumulated over the Web. Meme media technologies will make the Web work as a pervasive computing environment, i.e., an open system of computing resources in which users can dynamically select and interoperate some of these computing resources to perform their jobs satisfying their dynamically changing demands. Federation denotes ad hoc definition and/or execution of interoperation among computing resources that are not a priori assumed to interoperate with each other. We define knowledge federation as federation of computing resources published in the form of documents. This paper reviews and reinterprets meme media technologies from a new view point of knowledge federation over the Web and pervasive computing environments. It focuses on the following four aspects of meme media technologies: (1) media architectures for reediting and redistributing intellectual resources, (2) client-side middleware technologies for application frameworks, (3) view integration technologies for the interoperation and graphical integration of legacy applications, and (4) knowledge federation technologies for pervasive computing environments.

While the current Web technologies have allowed us to publish intellectual assets in world-wide repositories, to browse their huge accumulation, and to download some assets, we have no good tools yet to flexibly re-edit and redistribute such intellectual assets for their reuse in different contexts. This paper reviews the IntelligentPad and Intelligent-Box meme media architectures together with their potential applications, proposes both the use of XML/XSL or XHTML to define pads, and a world-wide web of meme pools. When applied to Web documents and services, meme media and meme pool technologies allow us to annotate Web pages with any types of meme media objects, and to extract and make any portions of them work as meme media objects. We can functionally combine such extracted meme media objects with each other or with other application meme media objects, and redistribute composite meme media objects for their further reuses by other people.

Many of today's Web applications support just simple trial-and error retrievals: supply one set of parameters, obtain one set of results. For a user who wants to examine a number of alternative retrievals, this form of interaction is inconvenient and frustrating. It can be hard work to keep finding and adjusting the parameter specification widgets buried in a Web page, and to remember or record each result set. Moreover, when using diverse Web applicationsin combination - transferring result data from one into the parameters for another - the lack of an easy way to automate that transfer merely increases the frustration. Our solution is to integrate techniques for each of three key activities: clipping elements from Web pages to wrap an application; connecting wrapped applications using spreadsheet-like formulas; and cloning the interfaceelements so that several sets of parameters and results may behandled in parallel. We describe a prototype that implements this solution, showing how it enables rapid and flexible exploration ofthe resources accessible through user-chosen combinations of Web applications. Our aim in this work is to contribute to research on making optimal use of the wealth of information on the Web, by providing interaction techniques that address very practical needs.