OntoLeO stands for Ontology of Learning Objects. It is a research project under development (july 2010 - july 2012) at the Department of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences - University of Cagliari. The main objective is the definition of a formal ontological representation of learning objects.

The project is carried out by Giuliano Vivanet (research fellow) under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Giuntini (Full professor of Logics at University of Cagliari) and with the active support of the ALOPHIS (Applied Logic, Philosophy and History of Science) Group.

Contacts: giuliano [dot] vivanet [at] unige [dot] it

Rationale

In the recent years, we have witnessed the development of several semantic-based educational projects whose aim is to improve educational content retrieval within digital object repositories.

They are usually based on the use of ontological schemes or other types of controlled vocabularies and semantic markup languages for resources indexing (representing the knowledge domain, as well as technical and pedagogical LO features, such as the instructional strategy, users profile, pedagogical objectives, and so on).

However, from a literature analysis, learning objects (LOs) ontologies appear frequently to be designed more on the basis of the pragmatic convenience of the specific application frame and the developers’ personal intuition than on a rigorous ontological analysis. There are two main problems related to this approach: the first one is a problem of “internal consistency”, while the second one is a problem of “external consistency”. In the first case (internal consistency), a not-formal approach can generate incoherent models, not rigorous, and not able to support logical reasoning processes. In the second one (external consistency) the disadvantages are represented by the fact that (i) these models cannot be re-used in different contexts from those in which they are originally designed; (ii) different repositories and their content retrieval systems cannot interoperate due to the lack of a common terminological and syntactic structure (for example, the same keywords are used with various meanings or, alternatively, different keywords are adopted to represent the same meaning).

General objectives

• definition of the ontological status of learning objects (by means of a phenomenological and ontological analysis the their nature and identity);
• definition of a LO ontological scheme (designed in order to describe in a semantic way learning objects and their properties and to classify them);
• development of new knowledge in the use of ontology-based systems for indexing and management of educational resources.

Operational objectives

• development of a LO ontology browsable by means of a semantic browser;
• definition of the specifications to implement the LO ontology in specific and real-world scenarios.

 

Acknowledgements: OntoLeO is a research project funded by the Regione Sardegna under the "Programma Master & Back – Percorsi di rientro – Avviso pubblico 2009 – Regione Sardegna (P.O.R. FSE 2007-2013 Competitività regionale e occupazione – Asse IV – Capitale umano - Attività i.3.1)"