Simple e-learning semantic tool

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a simple e-learning tool (SET) that can be used by students, teachers and librarians to build, evaluate, maintain and test knowledge of an arbitrary domain terminology. The core of the tool is a conceptual model developed in Protégé. The knowledge base used for testing the tool is from the Business Strategies domain and it contains more than 10,000 definitions from domain experts. The main advantages of using Protégé were in providing a valid and consistent structure for the initial set of largely unstructured data and in generating interfaces for the tool implementation. Compared to the other on-line glossaries, the emphasis here is on quality, by using domain expert knowledge; on diversity of that knowledge (a typical term will be accompanied with two or more definitions from different sources) and on simple to use additional e-learning features such as definition search, essay “helper”, visual domain explorer, test generator, etc. The related work has mainly been focused on the following areas, namely - development of domain ontologies, development of ontologies of learning resources 1 (e.g. Chimera’s Project Delta, as described in Gardner, 2007) and development of on-line glossaries (e.g. Merriam Webster Online ) and encyclopaedias (e.g. Wikipedia) . Our work differs from each of the above mentioned in that it builds on development of a general and reusable glossary ontology that uses as instances, definitions taken from domain textbooks and refereed journals. In addition to that, we provide an application built on top of this ontology that can be used as a cognitive support tool.