Ig Ibert Bittencourt

A computational model for developing semantic web-based educational systems

Recently, some initiatives to start the so-called semantic web-based educational systems (SWBES) have emerged in the field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED). The main idea is to incorporate semantic web resources to the design of AIED systems aiming to update their architectures to provide more adaptability, robustness and richer learning environments. However, the construction of such systems is highly complex and faces several challenges in terms of software engineering and artificial intelligence aspects. This paper presents a computational model for developing SWBES focusing on the problem of how to make the development easier and more useful for both developers and authors. In order to illustrate the features of the proposed model, a case study is presented. Furthermore, a discussion about the results regarding the computational model construction is available.

Recommendations in Online Discussion Forums for E-Learning Systems

In this paper, we outline the importance of discussion fora for e-learning applications. Due to a weak structure or size of the discussion forum, recommendations are required in order to help learners finding relevant information within a forum. We present a generic personalization framework and evaluate the framework based on a recommender architecture for the e-learning focused discussion forum Comtella-D. In the evaluation, we examine different sources of user feedback and the required amount of user interaction to provide recommendations. The outcomes of the evaluation serve as source for a personalization rule, which selects the most appropriate recommendation strategy based on available user input data. We furthermore conclude that collaborative filtering techniques can be utilize successfully in small data sets, like e-learning related discussion fora.

Applications of ontologies in requirements engineering: a systematic review of the literature

There is an increase use of ontology-driven approaches to support requirements engineering (RE) activities, such as elicitation, analysis, specification, validation and management of requirements. However, the RE community still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how ontologies are used in RE process. Thus, the main objective of this work is to investigate and better understand how ontologies support RE as well as identify to what extent they have been applied to this field. In order to meet our goal, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the primary studies on the use of ontologies in RE, following a predefined review protocol. We then identified the main RE phases addressed, the requirements modelling styles that have been used in conjunction with ontologies, the types of requirements that have been supported by the use of ontologies and the ontology languages that have been adopted. We also examined the types of contributions reported and looked for evidences of the benefits of ontology-driven RE. In summary, the main findings of this work are: (1) there are empirical evidences of the benefits of using ontologies in RE activities both in industry and academy, specially for reducing ambiguity, inconsistency and incompleteness of requirements; (2) the majority of studies only partially address the RE process; (3) there is a great diversity of RE modelling styles supported by ontologies; (4) most studies addressed only functional requirements; (5) several studies describe the use/development of tools to support different types of ontology-driven RE approaches; (6) about half of the studies followed W3C recommendations on ontology-related languages; and (7) a great variety of RE ontologies were identified; nevertheless, none of them has been broadly adopted by the community. Finally, we conclude this work by showing several promising research opportunities that are quite important and interesting but underexplored in current research and practice.

A Semantic Web-based authoring tool to facilitate the planning of collaborative learning scenarios compliant with learning theories

When the goal of group activities is to support long-term learning, the task of designing well-thought-out collaborative learning (CL) scenarios is an important key to success. To help students adequately acquire and develop their knowledge and skills, a teacher can plan a scenario that increases the probability for learning to occur. Such a scenario defines pedagogically sound structures that prevent off-task behavior and engage students in more meaningful interactions. The main difficulty in designing effective CL scenarios is transforming the teachers intentions into elements that constitute the learning scenario. This problem is frequently observed when novice teachers attempt to improve the quality of learning and instruction by blending collaborative activities with individual activities without careful planning. With the goal of helping teachers in planning collaborative scenarios, we have developed an intelligent authoring tool referred to as CHOCOLATO using Semantic Web technologies (e.g. ontologies) in order to represent knowledge about different pedagogies and practices related to collaboration. Through the use of this knowledge, CHOCOLATO can provide intelligent guidance that helps teachers to create theory-based CL scenarios which has proven to be effective in a variety of situations. We evaluated it by conducting two experiments. We were interested in verifying whether the recommendations given by CHOCOLATO help novice teachers to design pedagogically sound CL activities, and if these activities help students to learn collaboratively in real classroom settings. The first experiment had the participation of 58 pre-service teachers that created CL scenarios with and without our authoring tool and the second experiment was carried out in a Brazilian public school together with 218 students. The results suggest that the guidance provided by CHOCOLATO do help novice teachers plan, understand and share CL scenarios more easily. They also suggest that the continuous utilization of well-designed theory-based CL activities create favorable conditions for students (particularly less knowledgeable ones) to improve their overall performance throughout the school year.

Steps, techniques, and technologies for the development of intelligent applications based on Semantic Web Services: A case study in e-learning systems

Semantic Web Services domain has gained special attention in academia and industry. It has been adopted as a promise to enable automation of all aspects of Web Services provision and uses, such as service creation, selection, discovery, composition, and invocation. However, the development of intelligent systems based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) is still a complex and time-consuming task, mainly with respect to the choice and integration of technologies. In this paper, we discuss some empirical issues associated with the development process for such systems and propose a systematic way for building intelligent applications based on SWS by providing the development process with steps, techniques and technologies. In addition, one experiment concerning the implementation of a real e-learning system using the proposed approach is described. The evaluation results from this experiment showed that our approach has been effective and relevant in terms of improvements in the development process of intelligent applications based on SWS.

Rule-based expert systems to support step-by-step guidance in algebraic problem solving: The case of the tutor PAT2Math

In order for an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) to correct students’ exercises, it must know how to solve the same type of problems that students do and the related knowledge components. It can, thereby, compare the desirable solution with the student’s answer. This task can be accomplished by an expert system. However, it has some drawbacks, such as an exponential complexity time, which impairs the desirable real-time response. In this paper we describe the expert system (ES) module of an Algebra ITS, called PAT2Math. The ES is responsible for correcting student steps and modeling student knowledge components during equations problem solving. Another important function of this module is to demonstrate to students how to solve a problem. In this paper, we focus mainly on the implementation of this module as a rule-based expert system. We also describe how we reduced the complexity of this module from O(nd) to O(d), where n is the number of rules in the knowledge base, by implementing some meta-rules that aim at inferring the operations students applied in order to produce a step. We evaluated our approach through a user study with forty-three seventh grade students. The students who interacted with our tool showed statistically higher scores on equation solving tests, after solving algebra exercises with PAT2Math during an approximately two-hour session, than students who solved the same exercises using only paper and pencil.

A survey of security in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are a relatively new software paradigm that is being widely accepted in several application domains to address large and complex tasks. However, with the use of MAS in open, distributed and heterogeneous applications, the security issues may endanger the success of the application. The goal of this research is to identify the security issues faced by MAS and to survey the current state of the art of this field of knowledge. In order to do it, this paper examines the basic concepts of security in computing, and some characteristics of agents and multi-agent systems that introduce new threats and ways to attack. After this, some models and architectures proposed in the literature are presented and analyzed.

A Rule-Based Recommender System for Online Discussion Forums

In this paper we present a rule-based personalization framework for encapsulating and combining personalization algorithms known from adaptive hypermedia and recommender systems. We show how this personalization framework can be integrated into existing systems by example of the educational online board Comtella-D, which exploits the framework for recommending relevant discussions to the users. In our evaluations we compare different recommender strategies, investigate usage behavior over time, and show that a small amount of user data is sufficient to generate precise recommendations.

A framework for building web mining applications in the world of blogs: A case study in product sentiment analysis

Recently there has been much interest in electronic commerce applications that use data mining techniques to explore datasets in the social media context. However, most of the applications have already been developed in an ad hoc manner, mainly, due to the lack of adequate tools, yielding difficulties in customizing applications and requesting high time consuming for constructing and maintaining these applications. This work addresses these problems and proposes a software framework for building Web mining applications in the blog world. The architecture of the proposed framework combines the use of blog crawling and data mining algorithms, in order to provide a complete and flexible solution for building general-purpose Web mining applications. The framework flexibility allows some important customizations, such as the construction of adapters for reading text from different blogs, and the use of different pre-processing techniques and data mining algorithms. In order to improve the efficacy of information extraction from blogs, ontology is used in the blogs description. For this, there are software agents responsible for tracking and indexing blogs related to a specific tag and for mining blog datasets. Moreover, web services are used for encapsulating existing tools and maximize reuse. This framework has been instantiated in order to be applied for helping the blog users to effectively find out relevant information in the blog world. The focus of this paper is on describing the novel software architecture of the general framework (blog crawling and data mining) providing detailed information about the data mining sub-framework, which uses the semantic web services technology for automating service composition and consists on the main research contribution. A case study of an e-commerce application for analyzing the users sentiment regarding specific products is reported and its results considers the effort reduction when creating a web mining application by using the proposed integrated frameworks and existing data mining tools, as well as a qualitative analysis related to quality aspects of the developed application, such as the evolution impact.

Estado da Arte em Web Semântica e Web 2.0: Potencialidades e Tendências da Nova Geração de Ambientes de Ensino na Internet

As tecnologias educacionais com base na Web tem obtido excelente resultados nas ultimas decadas. Atualmente, diversos cursos no exterior e no Brasil sao oferecidos na modalidade “educacao a distância” onde a Internet e a plataforma base de comunicacao e interacao entre alunos e professores. Com os grandes avancos da Internet e a necessidade de oferecer formas mais eficazes de aprendizagem na Web, duas linhas de pesquisa estao em crescente expansao. A primeira delas e a Web Semântica que desenvolve tecnologias que permitem ao computador compartilhar e manipular as informacoes contidas na Web de forma adequada e inteligente. Com o uso desta tecnologia ambientes de aprendizagem ou agentes de software podem interagir entre si, trocar informacoes e auxiliar professores e alunos a selecionar, combinar e classificar o conteudo disponivel na Web. E a segunda e a Web 2.0, ou web Social, onde os usuarios sao beneficiados por diversas ferramentas para compartilhar e construir “conhecimento” de forma simples, interativa e colaborativa. O objetivo deste trabalho e estimular as pesquisas nacionais nestas areas apresentando o estado da arte sobre o uso da Web Semântica e da Web 2.0 no cenario educacional e a recente intersecao destas tecnologias para promover a nova geracao de ambientes educacionais para Web 3.0.