An Ontology-based Framework and its Application to Effective Collaboration

Abstract

In the past few years Artificial Intelligence has been gradually introduced to enhance Education through technologies. However, usual approaches provide systems with a kind of expertise using a set of heuristics and domain theories built in the procedures. As a result they cannot justify their recommendations systematically and scientifically. To overcome such problems it is necessary to establish a common understanding of what a learning theory is and how to represent it adequately. In this work we present part of our ontological framework that allows for the partial representation of learning theories considering explicitness, formalism, concepts and vocabulary. Then, we propose sophisticated techniques to reasoning on these theories considering their semantics showing the use of this framework to build a system called CHOCOLATO to facilitate the effective design and analysis of collaborative learning activities.

Keywords

• Ontological engineering
• CSCL
• theory-aware system