An OWL-Based Ontology For Courseware Description And Tool

Standardization of e-Learning is a guarantee for sharing e-Learning resources and interoperation between resource management systems. This paper has presented a variety of educational technology standards. As an international education technology specification, SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), for the advantage of its design conception and adoptive absorption from other related specifications, has gained more and more attention from industry and academic field. With the increase of SCORM conformable learning resource, how to organize and retrieval these resources effectively and user-friendly will have been settled urgently. By researching the method and process of building Ontology, this paper presents a new and improved method of building Ontology, and then illustrates an application about building Ontology in e-Learning resources domain.The domain ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization, which can represent domain knowledge and facilitate the interoperation between the heterogenous application systems. Ontology application in the World Wide Web, which leads to the semantic Web, shows an attractive solution to share Web information with awareness of semantics. A survey of recent research efforts on ontology is presented. It includes the definition of ontology, ontology description language, ontology construction methodology, semantic Web, and ontology applications. This paper elaborates the concept of ontology, the method of ontology-based semantic modeling and the semantic support of ontology in OWL. It builds e-Learning resources ontology LRO (e-Learning Resource Ontology)with the OWL language. Based on LRO, SDSC (Semantic Description for SCORM Courseware) a Semantic describe tool to SCORM courseware is designed and implemented.Based on OWL, the concepts in e-Learning resource domain and relations among these concepts, such as inheritance relationship, instance relationship and restrictions, are built by the e-Learning Ontology LRO(e-Learning Resource Ontology)to represent highly sharable and reusable domain knowledge. LRO can be used to describe the semantics of XML data or HTML page with RDF. Based on LRO, SDSC a Semantic describe tool is designed and implemented. It introduces the functions, development tools and the architecture of this system; and it also discusses the detailed design and implementation of main three modules. The tool provides an application pattern for ontology driven application in e-Learning resource management.