A Case Study of Collaborative Ontology Development for Higher Education

TL;DR: The application of an ontology mapping mechanism, based on semantic matching, and performed semi-automatically, with teacher validation, represents the main collaborative feature of the EduOntoFrame-2 methodology that was proposed for a full lifecycle university course educational ontologies development.

Abstract: Building efficient and high quality educational ontologies for computer-based intelligent tutoring and e-learning systems is an important challenge for universities, which could be viewed as a kind of “knowledge providers” for various expertise domains at different levels of education (undergraduate, postgraduate, Master, PhD). The solution can be given by following a collaborative ontology engineering methodology, adapted or designed for the educational domain specific to a university. The paper presents a detailed case study of collaborative ontology development for teaching some computer science related courses in a university. An extended version of the collaborative EduOntoFrame framework, EduOntoFrame-2, was applied as a methodological guide for the generation of the OOP-Onto educational ontology (for the course of Object Oriented Programming), which was provided in the owl/xml format by using Protege-4.3. The application of an ontology mapping mechanism, based on semantic matching, and performed semi-automatically, with teacher validation, represents the main collaborative feature of the EduOntoFrame-2 methodology that was proposed for a full lifecycle university course educational ontologies development. An analysis of the experimental results obtained during ontology mapping cases, performed with S-Match tool, is also discussed, in order to evaluate the quality of OOP-Onto, the collaborative generated university course ontology.