INMA: A knowledge-based authoring tool for music education

A knowledge-based authoring tool and its domain-knowledge acquisition capabilities are described. The authoring tool is called INMA and assists human tutors to create their own Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) for music education. Learner modeling in the resulting ITSs is primarily based on a cognitive theory that models human reasoning and is called Human Plausible Reasoning. The particular theory makes use of a very detailed knowledge representation of the domain of the part of music to be taught in the form of hierarchies, so that similarities, dissimilarities, generalizations and specializations among the tutoring concepts may be inferred. INMA incorporates a special knowledge acquisition component that can assist instructional designers on the task of constructing the music hierarchies required. The operation of this component is based on content-based retrieval and semantic meta-data.