Abstract
Semantic technologies have been studied and used in different areas of computer science. E-learning has been one of this, but the most frequent use of semantic technologies in this discipline has been in the extraction and indexing of contents, like forums, blogs, learning objects etc. The research presented in this paper aims at taking advantage of semantic technologies in a different way respect to the mainstream use that has been done in the past. This new approach refers to the use of semantic technologies in the management of the persistence layer of Learning Management Systems (LMS), i.e., where all the contents are stored. Our research follows the idea of using semantics technologies as a support, if not an entire replacement, of the backend and persistence mechanisms of LMSs. As a testbed, we will present the design and early results of the application of this approach to the persistence layer of a Virtual Communities System, where these technologies will enriched the platform to address two fundamental issues: a) entities disambiguation and identification inside the persisted objects b) adding new features to the platform without refactoring it.
Highlights
After many different phases, e-learning seems to have reached a successful position inside every organization
In this paper we will present a line of investigation regarding the application of semantic technologies to “Online Communities” (OC), a virtual communities platform that we are using in several projects with public and private institutions to support educational processes
We extended a domain ontology (SIOC) for the conceptual representation needs of the application, and added an RDF graph mapped onto the database, in order to add new functionalities to our virtual community platform
Summary
E-learning seems to have reached a successful position inside every organization. We extended a domain ontology (SIOC) for the conceptual representation needs of the application, and added an RDF graph mapped onto the database, in order to add new functionalities to our virtual community platform This allows us to take advantage of the inference processes available through a reasoner, and to substitute some parts of the business logic of the application. RDF has been selected for data representation, while tools like Hadoop, Flink and NoSQL databases have been used and tested as a replacement of “traditional” relational databases, and a bridge towards big data scenarios These tools and techniques have been experimented in other application fields, in data integration inside the fiscal evasion domain, where different data sources are reconciled through the use of the ENS for entity disambiguation. The last section will briefly present the achievements obtained with the application of semantic technologies and an entity-centric approach to our virtual communities platform
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
