José Ramón Hilera

Using Ontologies in Software Engineering and Technology

In this chapter, the state of the art on the use of ontologies in software engineering and technology (SET) is presented. The chapter is organized into four parts. In the second and third sections, serving as a supplement to Chap. 1,29 a wide review of the distinct kinds of ontologies and their proposed uses is presented respectively. In the fourth section, we offer a taxonomy for classifying ontologies in SET, in which two main categories are distinguished: (1) SET domain ontologies, created to represent and communicate agreed knowledge within some subdomain of SET, and (2) ontologies as software artifacts, with proposals in which ontologies play the role of an additional type of artifact in software processes. On the one hand, the former category is subdivided into those ontologies included in software engineering and those referring to other software technologies.

Special Issue on quality in e-learning

Quality is at the heart of education and training in all countries. Knowledge, information, and learning technologies are seen as a vital tool for achieving this. The promises of e-learning are to open up our systems to the world, improve access for all, and increase learning effectiveness. In addition, knowledge, information, and learning technologies are seen as a catalyst for change in our efforts to reform and modernize education and training for an improved knowledge society.

Factors with Negative Influence on Software Testing Practice in Spain: A Survey

Software testing is the commonest technique for software quality assurance. It is present in every development project and concentrates a large percentage of effort, there are still not many studies which address the real practice of individuals and organizations. Anyway, practitioners usually agree with the idea that software testing efficiency and effectiveness in their organizations might be improved. Two previous studies in Spain have revealed implemented testing practices in organizations and individual performance of software professionals when designing test cases should be improved. This paper presents the results of a survey designed to know if 23 factors determined by a panel of experts in 2007 may explain this situation of testing practice. Data collected reveal that none of the factors is clearly rejected as a negative influence for testing although some of them are not generally accepted. Exploratory statistical analysis reveals relations between certain pairs of items as well as a new grouping in factors.

Evaluating Simple Query Interface Compliance in Public Repositories

Standards and specifications widely accepted and used lay the foundations to enable and facilitate the interoperability among systems, and the software maintenance and reuse, especially within the scope of learning objects’ search systems. One of these standards is the SQI (Standard Query Interface) specification by the European Committee for Standardization in which many search systems, including public ones, are based. This paper analyzes the degree of compliance with this specification by a significant number of learning objects repositories.

Implementation of Accessibility Standards in the Process of Course Design in Virtual Learning Environments

Abstract This article presents a case study for the project “E-Inclusion to people with disabilities. Implementation of accessibility standards in the process of course design in virtual learning environments”, the objective of the project is to develop an innovative on-line educational program through pilot course experimentation, introducing key competences in the field of digital literacy through Internet. The project seeks to implement various guidelines and recommendations in an Open Source e-Learning system to develop and document a methodology to produce multimedia/interactive content following the main accessibility standards, improving the process of course design in virtual learning environments and complementing actual Instructional Design methodologies. This article is a work in progress document, presenting the motivation and justification of the project, general information, goals and first results. Finally some conclusions and future work activities are presented, including the main activities within the European project ALFA III – ESVI-AL.

Managing the quality of e-learning resources in repositories

Virtual learning in engineering education uses e‐learning resources in many different ways. These resources are normally stored in learning object repositories (LOR) where they are catalogued with metadata facilitating retrieval by end users. As ranking e‐learning resources according to quality criteria is considered helpful for end users, quality measures play a prominent role. This article presents a study for estimating the quality of learning objects (LO) by using the available data in MERLOT, a large LOR. The main result of this study is the identification, definition, and evaluation of quality metrics applicable to engineering e‐learning resources which can be adapted to other types of repositories for facilitating the search of e‐resources in general.

Assessment design: A step towards interoperability

The assessment in e‐learning systems is a basic element to successfully complete any formative action. In this article we present a generic, flexible, interoperable and reusable language for design assessments, and its implementation in the EDVI Learning Management System. This language is based on XML and we have used XML Schema technology. We also describe the language attributes required to set the assessment plan based on our practical experience in e‐learning courses. The main purpose of this language is to make the assessment design interoperable among systems in a simple and efficient way. An adequate implementation will also reduce the time required to configure assessment activities, simplifying and automating them.

Dialogue-Based Design of Web Usability Questionnaires Using Ontologies

Questionnaires are nowadays widely used usability evaluation instruments, and several generic usability questionnaires are available. But these generic artefacts are not always appropriate to evaluate a given setting, and constructing a questionnaire from scratch is a complex task requiring both expertise and resources, so that discount-usability approaches to questionnaire-based evaluation can make a good option in many cases. In this work, a novel knowledge-based approach to design Web usability questionnaires is described. The questionnaire model comprises different ontologies including concepts regarding questions and questionnaires, the different measures that can be obtained and the tasks that have to be carried out by users in order to evaluate a specific kind of Web application. As a proof of concept for the model, a prototype questionnaire design application is also described. The application demonstrates how facts can be gathered through a guided dialogue with the user, and how the system can use this information to tailor the resulting questionnaire to the concrete situation.

Developing Distributed Repositories of Learning Objects

A repository or digital storage of educative elements is a collection of resources (learning objects) accessible through a communication network. It is not necessary to have a previous knowledge about the collection containing the structure of the resources or only the metadata describing them, together with a reference to locate it (IMS DRI, 2003). The aim of a repository is to facilitate the reusability of educational resources, providing access to the stored resources to learning management systems (LMS); learning content management system (LCMS); content portals (for an instance: searching systems of digital libraries, World Wide Web searching, etc.); or any application/software developed to access to learning objects. Digital repositories, in the broadest sense, are used to store any sort of digital material. However, digital repositories for learning objects are much more complex in terms of what to store and how to do it. The purpose of a digital learning object repository is not just to store and distribute learning objects, but to allow them to be shared by different users and, above all, to make it easier to reuse them in different training activities (figure 1). From the users’ point of view, these repositories have the advantage of having access to the content stored in them. To make this possible, the content must be gathered through certain procedures, rules and standards whose implementation is intended to promote the reusability of learning objects. Moreover, the repository itself must follow a series of specifications and standards which enable to browse the content it stores and facilitate interoperability with other repositories. Most repositories are usually autonomous, that is, they work as portals that can be accessed through a Web-based interface, providing a search mechanism and a list of categories to conduct the search. However, it is becoming increasingly common the possibility of making federated searches in distributed repositories from the original repository. Some examples of this kind of search can be found in repositories such as those set out in table 1. In this way, it is possible to access to different repositories from the learning management platform, preview their contents and even download and incorporate them into a course.

A generalization of the method for evaluation of stemming algorithms based on error counting

Until the introduction of the method for evaluation of stemming algorithms based on error counting, the effectiveness of these algorithms was compared by determining their retrieval performance for various experimental test collections. With this method, the performance of a stemmer is computed by counting the number of identifiable errors during the stemming of words from various text samples, thus making the evaluation independent of Information Retrieval. In order to implement the method it is necessary to group manually the words in each sample into disjoint sets of words holding the same semantic concept. One single word can belong to only one concept. In order to do this grouping automatically, in the present work this constraint has been generalized, allowing one word to belong to several different concepts. Results with the generalized method confirm those obtained by the non-generalized method, but show considerable less differences between three affix removal stemmers. For first time evaluated four letter successor variety stemmers, these appear to be slightly inferior with respect to the other three in terms of general accuracy (ERRT, error rate relative to truncation), but they are weight adjustable and, most important, need no linguistic knowledge about the language they are applied to.