Leveraging the Semantic Web for Adaptive Education

Abstract

Abstract:In the area of technology-enhanced learning reusability and interoperability issues essentially influence the productivity and efficiency of learning and authoring solutions. There are two basic approaches how to overcome these problems -one attempts to do it via standards and the other by means of the Semantic Web. In practice, these approaches meet and many existing solutions are based on ontologies that take into account the available specifications and try to integrate them. Moreover, these ontologies can help us to achieve a certain kind of consensus and to contribute to the harmonization of the existing standards. This paper aims at addressing the issues of leveraging the Semantic Web to improve mechanisms for knowledge representation in the area of adaptive education. We attempt to view adaptive education from different perspectives and consider relationship of various aspects that often appear not to be connected.

Adaptive systems in the era of the semantic and social web, a survey

“…This is not surprising, since the primary goal of the Semantic Web is the exchange and processing of knowledge by machines. Semantic Web techniques have also been proposed as a formalism for application semantics to allow for so-called intra-operability, defined by Kravcik and Gasevic (2007) as interoperability between the modules of a system. As seen, HERA, for example, one of the first proposals to use Semantic Web technologies in adaptive systems follows this approach and this solution is also suggested in other applications and frameworks such as CHIME.…”

“…In the field of eLearning, for example, several standards describe the learning objects (LO), such as IMS LIP, IEEE LOM and SCORM. "Appendix A" provides details of the most used standards in adaptive systems and a discussion can be found in Dolog and Nejdl (2003), Aroyo et al (2006), and Kravcik and Gasevic (2007). These standards, which specify import and export format, are very useful for enabling interoperability between stable and centrally managed systems, but they are not the solution in many other situations, since they do not admit flexibility in knowledge representation.…”

“…Representing the rules with standard formats would allow the application's user modeling and adaptation mechanisms to be understood and evaluated for trustworthiness. This approach could also aid the task of reuse of adaptation strategies in different systems (Kravcik and Gasevic 2007).…”

“…In particular, we investigate whether it is possible to identify tasks and areas of adaptive systems where these techniques proved to be particularly successful and if the integration of these approaches can be a third way that gives the benefits of both of them. To date, there have been several reviews about the contribution of ontologies and Semantic Web to adaptive systems (see for example Dolog and Nejdl 2007;Antoniou et al 2004;Baldoni et al 2005;Abel et al 2007a;Kravcik and Gasevic 2007). However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no survey that deals with the use of Web 2.0 social annotations and mixed approaches in adaptive and user modeling systems.…”

Enrichment of Learner Profile with Ubiquitous User Model Interoperability

“…Adaptive educational systems have to investigate different types of knowledge relevant to provide effective personalization of learning environments. The authors of [45] specify the following basic aspects for adaptation: -The domain model that represents what is to be delivered and adapted. Brusilovsky et al [2] state that user model for adaptive hypermedia and adaptive educational systems frequently represents the user's knowledge, interest, goals background and individual treats.…”