ALOA is a framework for automatically generating metadata for learning objects (LOs). It uses a service-oriented architecture and web services to allow for flexible and extensible metadata generation. ALOA's core engine indexes LOs, extracts properties from them using extractors, generates metadata using generators, resolves conflicts, and translates the metadata. New extractors and generators can be easily plugged into ALOA. It provides automatically generated LOM metadata for online LOs in different formats and languages through a web services API.