Semantic Web Technologies for supporting learning assessment

The use of Semantic Web Technologies in eLearning has become more significant in recent years. A topic that has received less attention to date is the use of such technologies for supporting assessment processes. In this paper, an approach that makes use of Semantic Web Technologies to support the assessment of open questions in eLearning courses is described. This methodology combines domain ontologies, semantic annotations and semantic similarity measurements. It also incorporates an algorithm for extracting knowledge from students' answers. It has been applied in different courses and the results are also reported and discussed. In our approach, the behaviour of the algorithm for calculating the referred semantic similarity is defined by the teacher. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.