Ontologies for creating learning object content

Abstract

This paper gives a proposal to enhance learning object (LO) content using ontological engineering. In the previous work on using ontologies to describe LO researchers build ontologies for description of metadata. These semantically annotated metadata improves retrieval for objects describing the same or similar content. However, these ontologies do not improve an LO content. Our approach suggests creating LOs that have content marked up in accordance with domain ontologies. Accordingly, LOs can be used not only as learning materials, but can also be used in real world applications (e.g. simulation and CASE tools, etc.). This approach is based, on defining domain ontologies, annotation-based author tools, ontology languages (RDF), and transformation (e.g. XSLT). As an illustration, we developed a simple Web application for teaching Petri nets is a simulation-supported environment.