The L4All system provides an environment for the lifelong learner to access information about courses, personal development plans, recommendation of learning pathways, personalised support for planning of learning, and reflecting on learning. Designed as a web-based application, it offers lifelong learners the possibility to define and share their own timeline (a chronological record of their relevant life episodes) in order to foster collaborative elaboration of future goals and aspirations. A keystone for delivering such functionalities is the possibility for learner to search for ‘people like me’. Addressing the fact that such a definition of ‘people like me’ is ambiguous and subjective, this paper explores the use of similarity metrics as a flexible mechanism for comparing and ranking lifelong learners’ timelines.

 The paper appears in the  Proceedings of the 9^th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, B. Woolf et al. (Eds.): ITS 2008, LNCS 5091, pp. 142–151, 2008, Springer.