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To say that the Web has affected many societies and cultures is to understate its impact along several dimensions. The Web is a technology which not only affects, but in some sense encompasses societies, cultures, and certainly institutions. Higher education -- at least in the cluster of ways in which it is practiced in the US, the EU, and Japan -- is one such bundle of social institutions affected and encompassed by the Web. While it is possible to overstate or mis-state the Web's effect, whether on higher education or on other institutional clusters, the encompassing reach of the technology, used in every country on Earth by literally tens of millions of users, makes it clear that the Web truly has a revolutionary effect. However, exploring what the Web has affected and continues to effect is a necessary element of any accurate estimation of how the newly emerging Semantic Web may, in its turn, effect societies, cultures, and institutional clusters like higher education.

The big question for many researchers in the area of educational systems now is what is the next step in the evolution of e-learning? Are we finally moving from a scattered intelligence to a coherent space of collaborative intelligence? How close we are to the vision of the Educational Semantic Web and what do we need to do in order to realize it? Two main challenges can be seen in this direction: on the one hand, to achieve interoperability among various educational systems and on the other hand, to have automated, structured and unified authoring support for their creation. In the spirit of the Semantic Web a key to enabling the interoperability is to capitalize on the (1) semantic conceptualization and ontologies, (2) common standardized communication syntax, and (3) large-scale service-based integration of educational content and functionality provision and usage.

eLearning is fast, relevant and just-in-time learning grown from the learningrequirements of the new, dynamically changing, distributed business world. The term „Semantic Web" encompasses efforts to build a new WWW architecture that supports content with formal semantics, which enables better possibilities for searching and navigating through the cyberspace. As such, the Semantic Web represents a promising technology for realizing eLearning requirements. This paper presents an approach for implementing the eLearning scenario using Semantic Web technologies. It is primarily based on ontology-based descriptions of content, context and structure of the learning materials and benefits the providing of and accessing to the learning materials.

The European Academy for Semantic-Web Education, completely in English, involves studying one year at one of the above universities, and completing the second year with a stay in another of the partner universities. After this, the student may obtain, together with the European degree, a national Master of Science degrees for each of the visited universities (e.g., in Italy this would be the Laurea Specialistica degree).