Ontology technology for the development and deployment of learning technology systems - a survey

The World-Wide Web is undergoing dramatic changes at the moment. The Semantic Web is an initiative to bring meaning to the Web. The Semantic Web is based on ontology technology – a knowledge representation framework – at its core. We illustrate the importance of this evolutionary development. We survey five scenarios demonstrating different forms of applications of ontology technologies in the development and deployment of learning technology systems. Ontology technologies are highly useful to organise, personalise, and publish learning content and to discover, generate, and compose learning objects

Semantic web technology for web-based teaching and learning: A roadmap

The World-Wide Web has become the predominant platform for computer-aided instruction. Contentorientation, access and interactive features have made the Web a successful technology. The Web, however, is still evolving. We expect in particular Semantic Web technology to substantially impact Web-based teaching and learning. In this paper, we examine the potential of this technology and how we expect it to influence content representation and the work of the instructor and the learner

Applications of semantic web technology to support learning content development

The Semantic Web is based on ontology technology – a knowledge representation framework – at its core to make meaning explicit and more accessible to automatic processing. We discuss the potential of this technology for the development of content for learning technology systems. We survey seven application types demonstrating different forms of applications of ontologies and the Semantic Web in the development of learning technology systems. Ontology technologies can assist developers, instructors, and learners to organise, personalise, and publish learning content and to discover, generate, and compose learning content. A conceptual content development and deployment architecture allows us to distinguish and locate the different applications and to dis-cuss and assess the potential of the underlying technologies

The generation of e-learning exercise problems from subject ontologies

The teaching/ learning of cognitive skills, such as problem-solving, is an important goal in most forms of education. In well-structured subject areas certain exercise problem types may be precisely described by means of machine-processable knowledge structures or ontologies. These ontologies can readily be used to generate individual problem examples for the student, where each problem consists of a question and its solution. An example is given from the subject domain of computer databases

Adaptive E-learning content generation based on semantic web technology

The efficient authoring of learning content is a central problem of courseware engineering. Courseware authors will appreciate the benefits of tools which automate various authoring tasks. We describe a system, OntAWare, which provides an environment comprising a set of software tools that support learning content authoring, management and delivery. This system exploits an opportunity provided by the emerging technologies of the Semantic Web movement, most notably knowledge-representation standards and knowledge-processing techniques. The system represents a combination of these newer developments with earlier work in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). A key feature of the authoring environment is the semi-automatic generation of standard e-learning and other courseware elements (learning objects). Widely available standardised knowledge representations (ontologies) and ontology-structured content are used as source material. Standard courseware elements are produced by the application of graph transformations to these ontologies. The resulting products can be hosted by standards-compliant delivery environments. Adaptivity is an important characteristic of the system as a whole. Authors can select and customise new or existing subject ontologies and employ an appropriate teaching/learning strategy in the generation of learning objects. Instructors can configure the delivery environment either to offer strictly sequenced presentations to students, or to allow also varying degrees of free student navigation, based on the the runtime incorporation of domain ontologies. Students in turn can take the generated courses in the preconfigured delivery environment, and this delivery is dynamically customised to the individual student\u27s preferences and constantly monitored learning track. The combination of the semi-automatic generation of learning objects with an adaptive delivery environment is a central feature of this new system. Keywords: courseware generation, Semantic Web, ontology, learning object, adaptivity