Provide a summary of your user groups, research on user/customer requirements and the resulting user profiles, and how the project results will respond to these requirements/profiles.


The JEM user community collects developers of supporting technologies for mathematics, authors of eContents and users of eContent in teaching mathematics. All these groups benefit from exchanging views on how technology should be developed and how it is used in an educational context. JEM provides such a forum and organizes meetings where the presentations cover all the aspects involved in employing eContent in mathematical education.

The developers of technologies for enhancing eContent in mathematics are supported by JEM in their dissemination efforts by the availability of ''Software and services'' pages on the JEM portal. These are designed to give quick, informative descriptions, links and demonstrations to those who wish to further develop or use the software. After registration on the JEM site, it is possible to create such a description page and to maintain it regularly, using it as a way to direct JEM readers to one's own products. The member's blog can also serve this purpose and provide a ready to use way to publish news concerning releases, new features, patches, and so on.

For authors of eContent and in particular, for authors wishing to share or recommend learning resources, the JEM portal offers a fully LOM-compliant repository which is integrated with the free-tagging mechanism and with the comment and open reviews facility. JEM members may describe using standard metadata a resource and add a link for it. Since very recently, it is also possible to import LOM metadata from elsewhere thus facilitating the upload and registration of resources previously registered elsewhere. Each resource cataloged in the repository can be openly commented and/or reviewed formally by other members. Notice that it is possible to browse and comment the repository content without being a registered user of JEM, however this is not sufficient for adding a new resource.

The JEM repository is also acting as an OAI data provider that can be queried according to standard protocols of digital archives.

For users of eContent, the JEM portal offers a listing of case studies which may be consulted freely online. To enter a new case study, members need to compile a basic form which outlines briefly the structure of the description. This can be augmented by linking publications or URLs to it. The list of case studies is intended as a collection that can be best enlarged by the mathematics educators or by researchers in mathematics education since each case study can provide pedagogical guidelines on where and how to introduce technology in eLearning mathematics.

In general, the interests of the JEM community are easily seen from the JEM ''tag cloud''. Each tag on the JEM portal has an RSS feed associated with it, this means that tagging an item can be used both for dissemination purposes and for subscription purposes. Take for instance the tag ''OpenMath'', all news, blogs, events and pages which are tagged with it are listed on http://www.jem-thematic.net/en/taxonomy/term/8 and any user interested in OpenMath may subscribe to the RSS feed by pointing it to the corresponding feed http://www.jem-thematic.net/en/taxonomy/term/8/feed. This mechanism can be readily employed by all JEM community member to promote their activities, and to keep up-to-date with their interest.