Ontology Based Conceptual Framework of E-Learning

System The Future Perspective

N. Vanjulavalli
Department of Computer Science and Applications,
Periyar Maniammai University, Thanjavur
vanjulavallisn@gmail.com

Abstract. The e-learning community is aiming at having much more effective

services than which is currently provided by any one of the available computer
aided tutoring or learning management systems. Students and researchers need
vast amount of material and spend considerable amount of time trying to learn
about a particular subject or find relevant information. The success of the web
information accessing has encouraged the researchers in the field of Intelligent
Tutoring Systems (ITS) and LMS to focus on issues of interoperability and
reuse. Ontologies are used and addressed by the community as an important requirement to define content semantics; assure the interoperability between educational systems. The use of ontologies and the advent of intelligent services for
developing the web content, web filters, intelligent search engines and other applications are transforming the web of information into the semantic web. The
aim of this paper describes the role of ontologies in the web learning management systems and the standards for describing, developing, exchanging, accessing, annotating, combining and qualifying educational resources. We conclude
this paper by provoking the future ideas of research in the areas of ontologies
and e-learning system.
Keywords: Ontology, Semantic web, Knowledge models.

1 Introduction
E-learning is just in time education integrated with high velocity chains. It aims at
replacing old fashioned time/place/content predetermined learning with a just in
time/customized/on-demand process of learning. It requires changes in the organizational behavior establishing a culture of Learn in the morning, do in the afternoon.
Thus an IT platform, which enables efficient implementation of such a learning infrastructure, is also needed. With wireless and mobile technologies, it is possible to realize anytime, anywhere, any way, any device for e-learning and educating.
The term ontology is originated from philosophy, where ontology is a semantic account of existence. Information on the web is commonly represented in natural language for human understanding. In order for the computer to understand its meaning
it is necessary to represent the information in a form that can be semantically and
syntactically. Such representations help in the processes of analyzing, extracting and
integrating information on the web, making it easier the creation of solid knowledge
R. Kannan and F. Andres (Eds.): ICDEM 2010, LNCS 6411, pp. 125130, 2011.
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

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bases that intelligent services can rely on to support users needs. The ontology is to
formally describe shared meaning of the used vocabulary. In fact ontology constraints
the set of possible mapping between the symbols and their meanings. But the shared
understanding problem in e-learning occurs on several aspects of document usage.
The shared understanding problem in e-learning occurs when one tries to define the
content of a learning document in the process of providing learning materials as well
as in the process of accessing to particular learning material.
Ontology as an informal conceptual system in the context of e-learning means the
presence of an conceptual system to underlie a particular knowledge.
From an Artificial intelligence point of view, ontology can be seen as The basic
structure or armature around a knowledge base can be built. It means that ontologies
try to explain how the world is configured by introducing a system of critical categories and their intrinsic relations which allows a shared understanding and semantic
interoperability. It provides a set of fundamental concepts that includes the vocabulary, the semantic interconnections between concepts and simple rules of inference for
some specific task or domain.

2 E-Learning and Semantic Web

The great success of the current www leads to a new challenge: a huge amount of data
is interpretable by humans only, machine support is limited. Berners lee suggests
enhancing the web by machine processable information which supports the user in his
tasks. For instance todays search engines are currently quite powerful but still return
to offer too large or inadequate list of hits.
Semantic web technology can improve the effectiveness of the digital resource
sharing. By using an ontology inference service, searching no longer need to be constrained to matching the content only, but also by inferring the true meaning of the
concept it is possible to retrieve all knowledge equivalent resources.
The machine process able information can point the search engine to the relevant
page that can improve the precision. To attain this goal the semantic web will be built
up in different levels: Unicode/ Unified Resource Identifiers, XML, RDF ontologies,
logical proof and so on. The important property of the semantic web architecture
enabled by a set of suitable agents, establishes a powerful approach to satisfy the elearning systems. Since it provides all means for e-learning ,ontology development,
ontology based annotation of learning materials , the competition in learning courses
and proactive of the learning materials through e-learning portals.

3 Metadata
Metadata means data about data to describe and how and when and by whom a particular set of data was collected, and how the data is formatted. Meta data is essential
for understanding information stored in data warehouses and has become increasingly
important in XML-based web applications. Metadata is structured information that
describes, explains, locates, or makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.

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Metadata contains object, person, time, subject, space and event. They make knowledge become static or dynamic and always include the following nine categories.
General, lifecycle, meta-metadata, technological, educational, rights, relation, annotation and classification.
Learning object metadata describes learning resources using the following nine
categories:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

General: describe the general information of learning resource.

Lifecycle : describe the history and current state of learning resource and its
evolution information
Metadata: describe the specific information about the metadata record itself,
for example, this metadata record is created by whom, etc.
Technical: describe the technical requirements and characteristic of learning
resource.
Educational: describe the key educational or pedagogical characteristics of
the learning resource.
Rights: describe the intellectual property rights and conditions of use for the
learning resources.
Relation: define the relationships among this resource and other targeted resource.
Annotation: provide comments on the educational use of learning resource,
for example, this annotation is created by whom.
Classification; describe classification criteria and hierarchy of learning resource

4 Analysis of the Method for Building Ontology

There are various methodologies followed in the development of ontology. The skeletal methodology defines four main phases.
1.
2.
3.
4.

Identifying a purpose and scope

Building ontology capture(ontology coding, reusing existing ontology)
Evaluation(Verification and Validation)
Documentation

It provides with initial guidelines for ontology development; clarity for effective
communication in future, coherence, extensibility, minimal ontological commitment.
According to Natalaya F.Roy it is a seven step method that describes the process of
developing ontology in the following steps.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Determine the domain and scope of the ontology.

Consider reusing existing ontologies.
Enumerate important terms in the ontologies.
Define the classes and the class hierarchy.
Define the properties of classes-slots.
Define the facets of the slots.
Create instances.

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In the process of developing ontology the first step is acquiring the domain knowledge (specification), the second step is designing the conceptual structure, the relationship between the concepts and the third step is ontology implementation and formation. Ontology evaluation and documentation also plays a major role in development process.

5 Knowledge Engineering and Ontology

Ontology Engineering is a subfield of Knowledge Engineering that studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies. It researches the ontology development process, the ontology life cycle, the methods and methodologies for building
ontologies and the tools suite and languages that support them. Ontology Engineering
is still a relatively immature discipline so knowledge Engineering field uses the IEEE
1074-2006 standard for its use. It follows the software development lifecycle method.
The ontology is developed mainly for knowledge acquisition. To implement it specification and conceptualization are needed. Evaluation works on Implementation and
maintenance phase. Documentation works throughout the whole ontology development life cycle.
A brief description of Knowledge Engineering approach is presented below:
1.

2.

3.
4.

5.

Identify the purpose and requirements specification: Concerns to clearly identify

the ontology purpose, scope and its indented use, that is, the competence of the
ontology.
Ontology acquisition: The goal is to capture the domain concepts based on the
ontology competence. The relevant domain entities (e.g. concepts, relations, slots
and role) should be identified and organized into hierarchy structure. The phase
involves three steps as follows: i) Enumerate the important concepts and terms in
the domain ii) Define concepts, properties and relations of concepts, and organize
them into hierarchy structure iii) Consider reusing existing ontology.
Ontology Implementation: Aims to explicitly represent the conceptualization
captured in a formal language.
Evaluation/Check: The Ontology must be evaluated to check whether it satisfies
the specification requirements. It should be evaluated in relation to the ontology
competence and ontology design criteria. The competency questions play an essential role in the evaluation of the completeness of the ontology, especially when
considering the axioms.
Documentation: All the ontology development must be documented, including
purposes, requirements, textual descriptions of the conceptualization and formal
ontology. An approach to document on ontology is to use a hypertext, allowing
browsing along term definitions, examples and its formalizations including the
axioms.

The development and deployment of ontologies is not an easy task. It requires sophisticated methodology and still sometimes it is more an art rather than technology. In educational domain the problem of building ontologies has been tackled by different research
groups providing many different approaches to deal with ontology development.

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Ontology editors typically offer a graphical interface where it is possible to create /

edit ontologies looking deeply on the fundamental concepts, their attributes. Properties and relationships, without making too much attention about how to represent
them in a formal language such as OWL or RDF/RDFs. Free ontology editors currently available that can be used for educational purposes are TM4L, HOZO, Onto Edit
and Protg.

6 Case Study: Development of C Programming Ontology

In the process of development of C programming ontology we identify the purpose
and requirements specification, ontology acquisition, implementation and evaluation.
The first phase is a step towards creation of sharable and reusable adaptive educational systems. The ontology as a conceptual courseware structure any greatly enrich
the teaching process , also providing students an organizing axis to help them mentally mark their visions in the information hyperspace of the domain knowledge.
The second phase concentrates on working with the enumeration of important concepts and terms for teaching C programming course. It is followed by the definition of
concepts, properties and relation of concepts. Taxonomic (is-a and part of) relationship and non taxonomic relationship (participant in).
Then at the next stage implementation of C programming ontology is done by organizing the concepts according to is-a, part-of and participant-in relations.
At the final stage of the development of c programming ontology evaluation is
done from both perspectives as a knowledge base framework and as an interface
framework. The structural consistency as a domain knowledge representation and the
quality of ontology-based interface is to be evaluated on the subjective and objective
levels.

7 Future Research Challenges and Directions

Semantic web has a big potential for improving technology enhanced learning in
many respects. However the semantic web is still in its infancy we believe that one of
the technologies that will help anytime, Anywhere, any body learning is ontology
engineering which is a new knowledge generation technology to help people organize
knowledge in a computer understandable manner.
Different research groups have been involved in ontology engineering research in
recent years. Ontology engineering enables us to build the so called theory-aware
systems, which can help learners to structure learning materials compliant with instructional learning theories and guide them to perform collaborative learning. The
two other research questions are to develop an e- learning system where feedback is
based on ontologies and these ontologies can be changed or reused, adopted and or
extended. The focus in this research will be on the representation of ontologies using
the language, grammar, grammar analysis techniques, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence testing to create feedback.

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8 Conclusion
Semantic web technologies and applications are getting increasingly popular and
adapted in different fields including education. Some of the distinctive features are:
1.
2.
3.
4.

More adaptive and personalized learning environments.

A better use of pedagogical to enhance instruction/learning.
Effective information sharing, storage and retrieval.
New form of collaboration with peers.

The ontology based search service enables customized search. The improved search
performance using ontologies will extend reusability of learning contents and provide
more systematic learning for learners. It is required to build domain ontologies for all
subjects in future.

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