Publikation
Description of an Instructional Ontology and its Application in Web Services for Education
Carsten Ullrich
In: Poster Proceedings of the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC2004. IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC-2004), Hiroshima, Japan, Pages 93-94, 11/2004.
Zusammenfassung
From an educational point of view, the potential of the Web is far from being reached. Although it offers an abundance of learning resources the search for educational resources is still tedious, and interoperability of e-learning systems only a wished-for goal. What is missing is a common ground for both human and machines. While there exist standards for describing learning resources, they fail to address the instructional purpose of a resource, for instance whether a web page provides a definition or a counter-example of a concept. However, such an explicit representation of the instructional function provides humans with a shared vocabulary and can serve as the basis for the semantic interoperability for machines. This article describes such a basis: an ontology of instructional objects (OIO) that captures the function of a learning resource. The article starts with describing several educational Web services that can benefit from it. Then, the ontology is described in detail.