Azeddine Chikh

Towards an Ontology for Supporting Communities of Practice of E-Learning CoPEs: A Conceptual Model

The Community of Practice of E-learning (CoPE) represents a virtual space for exchanging, sharing, and resolving problems faced by actors in e-learning. One of the major concerns of CoPEs is to favor practices of reuse and exchange through the capitalization of techno-pedagogical knowledge and know-how. In this paper, we present a conceptual model of CoPEs. This model constitutes the theoretical platform upon which an ontology dedicated to CoPEs will be built. This ontology aims to annotate the CoPEs knowledge resources and services, so as to enhance individual and organizational learning within CoPEs.

An Ontology Based Information Security Requirements Engineering Framework

Software Requirement Specification (SRS) is frequently evolving to reflect requirements change during project development. Therefore, it needs enhancement to facilitate its authoring and reuse. This paper proposes a framework for building a part of SRS related to information security requirements (ISRs) using ontologies. Such a framework allows ensuring ISRs traceability and reuse. The framework uses three kinds of generic ontologies as a solution to this problem - software requirement ontology, application domain ontology, information security ontology. We propose to enhance SRS by associating the ISR with specific entities within ontologies. We aim to facilitate a semantic-based interpretation of ISRs by restricting their interpretation through the three previous ontologies. Semantic form is used to improve our ability to create, manage, and maintain ISRs. We anticipate that the proposed framework would be very helpful for requirements engineers to create and understand the ISRs.

A Semantic Based Approach for Knowledge Capitalization in Communities of Practice of E-Learning

Communities of Practice of E-learning CoPEs are considered as a virtual framework for exchanging and sharing techno-pedagogic knowledge and know-how between actors of e-learning. However, after analyzing of knowledge management modalities in some CoPEs, the authors noticed that knowledge is often represented in a way that does not facilitate its access and reuse. Accordingly, this paper focuses on knowledge capitalization in CoPEs and proposes an ontology-based framework aiming to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. This framework is structured into three layers: 1 the ontology layer, 2 the semantic annotation layer, and 3 the asset layer. It provides respectively, a common vocabulary within a CoPE aiming to enable a shared understanding between its members, a semantic support to annotate its knowledge assets facilitating their retrieval and reuse, and a means of storage and indexing its different assets. The paper is illustrated with a case study related to a semantic adaptive wiki, a service proposed for a CoPE made up of a teaching staff in computer science at the USTHB University in Algeria.

Communities of Practice of E-learning CoPE Definition and Concepts

Communities of practice (CoPs) focus on several fields such as engineering, management, and teaching. They offer numerous advantages: exchanging and sharing expertise, collaboration, training and joint development of tacit and explicit knowledge. Our purpose is to extend the application of these communities to the e-learning field. The result of this extension is a new category of CoPs called CoPE (communities of practice of e-learning) which combines two fields: 1) CoPs as basic field; and 2) eE-learning as an application domain. We define the concept of CoPE and the underlying concepts such as learning situations, actors and their roles, activities and possible types of interactions, as well as the environment composed of services, tools and resources.

ALEM: A Reference Model for Educational Adaptive Web Applications

The adaptive hypermedia systems or adaptive web applications is a research area between hypermedia and user modeling. It can customize hyperspace to different users. The existing reference models are generic and are not dedicated to educational systems. This chapter presents in the first part, a reference model that is specific to adaptive educational hypermedia systems. This model is called ALEM (Adaptive Learning Environment Model). It consists of a domain model, a learner model, a course structuring model and an adaptation model. The main contribution of this model is modeling the adaptive learning curriculum. Furthermore, we develop the UML Tutor application which is an educational adaptive hypermedia system based on our reference model.

Building a community memory in communities of practice of e‐learning: A knowledge engineering approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to define a community memory for a virtual communities of practice (CoP) based on organizational learning (OL) concept and ontologies.Design/methodology/approach – The paper focuses on applying the OL concept to virtual CoP and proposes a framework for building the CoP memory by identifying several layers of ontologies such as generic, knowledge, domain, and task ontologies. A CoP of e‐learning is used as an example of semantic learning organization and as an application for the proposed framework.Findings – Applying the proposed framework on the CoP of e‐learning and more specifically in the instructional engineering domain shows that community knowledge can be reified and shared among the members. This framework can be used as a backbone for other CoP in other fields.Originality/value – This present work proposed a general framework for the CoP memory using a knowledge engineering approach and proposing different forms of ontologies as a backbone for the memory. It...

Capitalizing Knowledge in Communities of Practice of e-Learning: Ontology-Based Community Memory

Together members of a community of practice (CoP) share their expertise and mutual understanding about a common domain to develop greater knowledge and build best practices. Due to the informal character of learning within a CoP, most of the knowledge is mainly tacit and needs to be reified and capitalized. The aim of this paper is to model the CoP to include the community memory in order to manage its knowledge. A CoP is considered as a learning organization where members are interacting, producing, exchanging and adapting resources and knowledge to meet their needs. The CoP memory is based on a framework with several ontologies including knowledge, domain and task ontology. The application of the proposed framework is done through a CoP of e-learning.

Comparative evaluation of four multi-label classification algorithms in classifying learning objects

With the increasing number of learning objects (LOs), the possibility of their fast and effective retrieving and storing has become a more critical issue. The classification of LOs enables users to search for, access, and reuse them in an effective and efficient way. In this article, the multi‐label learning approach is represented for classifying and ranking multi‐labeled LOs, whereas each LO might be associated with multiple labels as opposed to a single‐label approach. A comprehensive overview of the common fundamental multi‐label classification algorithms and metrics will be discussed. In this article, a new multi‐labeled LOs dataset will be created and extracted from ARIADNE Learning Object Repository. We experimentally train four effective multi‐label classifiers on the created LOs dataset and then, assess their performance based on the results of 16 evaluation metrics. The result of this article will answer the question of; what is the best multi‐label classification algorithm for classifying multi‐labeled LOs?

A Full Service Approach for Multimedia Content Retrieval

The present paper tackles the access problem to distributed and heterogeneous data sources. In this context we propose a full service approach for composing a new pattern of services. This pattern, called multimedia web services (MaaS: Multimedia as a Service): is able to retrieve data regarding their type (image, video, audio, text). The composition of WSM allows to resolve user requests. The proposed approach for MaaS composition is based on two main principles: the clustering and the filtring of WSDL data.

Towards a dynamic software requirements specification

This paper focuses on software requirements documentation and more specifically on the software requirements specification document. It aims to help the requirements engineers to be more efficient in writing this document. Indeed we propose a dynamic document model to represent software requirements specification where most part of it will be automatically fed from a requirements database. Hence authors will focus mainly on the text part of the specification that requires their problem domain knowledge and writing expertise. So a central challenge for this research work is how to make dynamic software requirements specification. A case study related to the software requirements specification of a hotel reservation system will be built based on the new model.