A pragmatic use of Semantic Web technologies for preschool cognitive skills tutoring system

Abstract

Primarily preschool cognitive skills are abilities of acquiring generic knowledge. Generic knowledge is said to be the knowledge about kinds of things. Currently these cognitive skills are taught through the use of pre-authored (in the form of books or worksheets) learning contents containing the objects and concepts of the real world. This method of teaching is known as instructional pedagogy that has several limitations such as it require specialized skills and a large amount of time for content authoring, thinking and dedication and it does not support individualized learning. As a remedy to the limitations of instructional pedagogy, constructive pedagogical method provides learning through exploration. The present work proposes an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that follows the constructive approach for preschool cognitive skills tutoring. The proposed ITS uses the Semantic Web technologies namely Ontologies and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) for the construction of a rule-based ITS. The reason is, Ontologies natively (by definition) provides a formal explicit way of modeling concepts in a domain of discourse specially the real world objects and also support rule base reasoning. Finally shortcomings of the existing knowledge sources (ontologies) and step by step processing of the inference engine to generate learning contents is provided in the present work.