ARIADNE is a European foundation that aims to foster "Share and Reuse" of learning resources. To support this goal, ARIADNE has created an infrastructure for managing learning objects in an open and scalable way. This paper describes the technical approach behind our open, standards based infrastructure, how content providers can connect to it, and the value they can derive from doing so. As such, the abundance that we help to unlock will act as a platform for innovation by tool developers, trainers and teachers and learners themselves. Key words: ariadne, learning objects, metadata, reuse, interoperability