Profiling learners with special needs for custom e-learning experiences, a closed case?

Contrary to what commonly thought, profiling users and devices is still a complex issue, especially in the case of learners with special needs, who deserve a customized access to e-learning platforms. A plethora of languages, protocols and tools have been proposed which can be exploited to create users' and devices' profiles, separately. Unfortunately, none of them is really effective in capturing the fundamentals of a learner profile, when used in isolation. Here we discuss a practical approach we devised to profile e-learners, which is able to meet the variety of requirements providing educational experiences. Our approach is based on the idea to put together the strengths of ACCLIP and CC/PP protocols, while avoiding specification conflicts. A few examples are provided which show the efficacy of the approach.