Abstract:

This article describes new components of the OntoMathEdu ecosystem designed for use in educational applications. The central component of the ecosystem is the OntoMathEdu ontology for school geometry developed by authors earlier.

Our goal is to make the most of the ontology in educational applications, therefore the development of new educational software services based on OntoMathEdu ontology is an important task. In this article, we describe the main decisions and results obtained in the development of new software services that are part of the OntoMathEdu ecosystem.

Currently we have developed the following services based on the OntoMathEdu ontology:
• Formula storage is used as an auxiliary data set for building test tasks and other informational components. The repository of school geometry formulas is organized as a collection of records, where each record consists in the following fields:
1) Natural language statement in Russian, extracted from educational textbooks;
2) Formula representation of this statement in LaTeX format;
3) Formalization of this formula in OpenMath format, where OntoMathEdu ontology is used as a OpenMath content dictionary.
• Ontology enrichment service that includes a set of methods that work to refine the relationships between ontology concepts and improve the horizontal connectivity of concepts of the ontology.
• The test generator is used to automatically create new test problems based on the developed classification of educational problems on the Moodle learning platform. We have identified the following grounds for classifying questions: by educational tasks, by the level of acquisition, by the possibilities of formalization, by the features of the subject
content.

The developed service also uses concepts and concept relations of the ontology for test generating.
• Collection of test questions is used as a data source for other components of the ecosystem.
• Semantic Formula Search performs a semantic search for educational mathematical texts. When implementing this component, special markup of mathematical texts is used, which marks the structural sections of the mathematical document, such as theorems, proofs, definitions, ontology concepts, etc.

As a result of the search, the module returns a set of texts containing the requested concept and offers a list of related concepts for further navigation through the text database.
• Recommender system helps the user to learn related concepts thus providing consistent learning. This module provides the student with additional information about the concept being studied.

The developed components make it possible to develop personalized recommendation systems for finding information, solving problems and marking up educational texts.

In this article, we provide a detailed description of the individual components of the ecosystem, indicating the degree of their development, as well as the relationship of the components with each other. Possible implementation of the described ecosystem components is given.

Keywords:

OntoMathEdu ontology, software service, educational application, test generator, test question.