An Upper Ontology for E-Learning Material Semantic Annotations

Abstract

Recent research reveals a great interest to introduce the Semantic Web as a promising technology for realizing eLearning requirements. The new, dynamic and distributed business world has motivated the research on developing eLearning. ELearning is efficient, task relevant and just-in-time learning. It gives the learner the ability to efficiently access the related educational resources just-in-time from any place. The vision of the Semantic Web is to make the Web data not only processable but also understandable so it can be used by machines not just for display purposes but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. This study investigates the role of Semantic Web in realizing the e-learning requirements. It proposes an ontology-based e-learning framework that considers the main three component roles of the e-learning architecture: an author, a learner and a repository. The study also shed the light on improving the conventional metadata standards that are used to describe learning materials by proposing a semantic-based ontology to describe three different dimensions of the learning material: content, context and structure. Adopting the proposed ontology would result in facilitating both the process of finding suitable learning materials to build up a certain course and the process of navigating through the learning course.