Advanced ontology management system for personalised e-Learning

The use of ontologies to model the knowledge of specific domains represents a key aspect for the integration of information coming from different sources, for supporting collaboration within virtual communities, for improving information retrieval, and more generally, it is important for reasoning on available knowledge. In the e-Learning field, ontologies can be used to model educational domains and to build, organize and update specific learning resources (i.e. learning objects, learner profiles, learning paths, etc.). One of the main problems of educational domains modeling is the lacking of expertise in the knowledge engineering field by the e-Learning actors. This paper presents an integrated approach to manage the life-cycle of ontologies, used to define personalised e-Learning experiences supporting blended learning activities, without any specific expertise in knowledge engineering. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.