Abstract:

This paper aims to develop an ontology to manage, store and retrieval of explicit knowledge gained in Learning Skills (4 C’s) practices. The semantic Web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee as a new field of research, and according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) the Semantic Web is defined as ”an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. It is based on the idea of having data on the Web defined and linked such that it can be used for more effective discovery, automation, integration, and reuse across various applications”.

In the field of the Artificial Intelligence, Neches was the first to define an ontology, and he did it as follows: ”Ontology defines the basic terms and the relations that include the vocabulary of a specific area, in addition to the rules to combine terms and relations to define extensions to the vocabulary”. Gruber defines the ontology as: ”An explicit specification of a conceptualization”, being this definition the most referenced in the literature. Borst slightly modify Gruber’s definition saying that: ”Ontologies are defined as a formal specification of a shared conceptualization”. These last two definitions have been merged and explained by Studer and colleagues as follows: ”An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. Conceptualization refers to an abstract model of some phenomenon. Explicit means that the type of concepts used, and the constraints on their use are explicitly defined. Formal refers to the fact that the ontology should be machine-readable. Shared reflects the notion that an ontology captures consensual knowledge, that is, it is not private of some individual, but accepted by a group”.

The volume of knowledge generated in classroom is overwhelming, the classes tend to repeat and do not learn from previous classes. This work looks forward to have an ontology to manage and be the knowledge base use a semantic information retrieval of those events. This paper used last two year of classes of the same topic in different institutions to extract and use the data from 4 C’s - critical thinking, creative thinking, communicating, and collaborating.

The main objective of designing this initial model in the Education domain is aiming to represent the explicit knowledge generated in the classrooms. This model should work as a framework to deploy semantic systems for Education. The EXKN Ontology presented here will provide support to the Information Retrieval (IR) in three important ways: by concept-based indexing, by querying by inference and by improving the navigation.

We reuse from Ortiz et al the IR, the EgoIR is a java-based system that offers an ontology-based approach to Information Retrieval, and its main goal is to retrieve e-Gov documentation. In our future work, we will be focused on further enhancement and evaluation of
the Ontology; we will be centred on the reasoning capabilities and add more learning skills knowledge.

Keywords:

Semantic Web, Ontologies, Knowledge Representation, Higher Education, Innovation.