ONTOLOGY-BASED LEARNING OBJECTS SEARCH AND COURSES GENERATION

Learning objects paradigm is widely adopted in e-learning environments. Learning objects management can be improved using semantic technologies from ontology engineering and the semantic web. In this article we use a semantic model of the repository to improve both learning objects retrieval and composition. The use of domain knowledge enables automatic reasoning and makes the system able to import new domain models and use them to interrogate the repository (Arrigoni Neri 2005). Learning objects composition is one of the main challenges in e-learning management systems and can be improved exploiting ontological reasoning. The building of a course can be carried out in two phases, in the first phase we compose concept level entities to obtain an outline of the course, then we fill the outline with actual resources from the repository. Both phases can use ontology-based models to capture specific domain knowledge (Arrigoni Neri 2006). In order to provide an intuitive and expressive ontology representation, we briefly propose a graphical syntax for the well-known ontology web language (OWL).