Research, Shared Ontology-based Learning Objects

With the rapid development of Internet and the global requirement of life education, E-Learning is becoming an important application on the Internet. The learning resource become richer and richer with the application of E-Learning, but there are still some disadvantages, such as the learning resource can't be searched effectively, poor sharing, resources rebuilding and the exist of information island.Learning resource standardization and the appearance of Learning Objects accelerate the sharing of resource. We firstly discussed the definition and phylogeny of Learning Object and focused on the taxonomy and the organizing status quo both in and abroad. Then we researched the Learning Object standardization and emphasized on the scarcity of standards' application in China. Basis on these research we pointed out that the underlying reason is the weak-semantic resource and the weak sharing mechanism.To solve those problems, the explicit, specify and accordant representation of Web resources is needed. Hence, the metadata standard is put forward for the resource description and Learning Object tends towards standardization. But there are still some shortages of learning resource standards, such as they emphasize specifications of properties and can't depict the subjective information of the materials.As a conceptual model, Ontology can express the basic knowledge system of a domain. Basis on the sufficient research of basic theories of Semantic Web, Ontology and the necessity and feasibility to apply Ontology to Web resources, we proposed to depict the learning object semantics by ontology and implemented in the semantic web framework, thereby improving the learning object sharing through semantic interoperability. We investigated the expression ability of Ontology description languages such as RDF, OIL, OWL, and anylisised a variety of Ontology developing tools. We selected OWL as the Ontology description language and established a Learning Object Ontology (OntoLo) by Protege. Additionally, the conceptions, relations, properties and instances of OntoLo are discussed deeply which provides a semantic foundation for achieve sharing overall. At last, we proposed the Ontology-based Learning Object sharing model in Semantic Web environment.