Use of ontology in addressing the issues of question similarity in distributed question bank

Abstract

E-learning can play a very important role in facilitating teachers to share their teaching material, tools and experiences with others through the medium of Internet and Web Technologies. This may further be extended in assessing the level of understanding of the students using the conventional method of question paper based examination. There are several practical difficulties in setting up a good question paper. We address this issues in the context of a distributed question bank (DQB) created by different experts in related fields. This DQB can then be used to automatically or manually generate a question paper when needed. This paper focuses on one of the critical aspects in generating a question paper from the question bank i.e. finding the types of similarities among the questions. This is essential to ensure that the questions taken are not pertaining to overlapping concepts leading to redundancy. In this paper we explore the possibility of using the semantic web technologies in general and ontology in particular in addressing the issues in question similarity.