Maria Aparecida Martins Souto

An ontological approach for the quality assessment of computer science conferences

Today the proliferation of the availability of the information of scientific events on the Web has created the necessity to offer a quickly access to upto-date information about the quality of these events. This requirement demands for (semi) automatic tools to speedily provide this information. The human-performed activity of the information quality evaluation is extremely time consuming and easily leads to failures. The application OntoQualis here described was motivated to support the quality evaluation of Scientific Conferences, in the Computer Science area, based on the graduated programs evaluation protocol of the Brazilian agency CAPES. The evaluation mechanism is specified in the QUALIS document specifically designed to assess journals and conferences ranking. This paper presents a brief vision of the ongoing process of domain analysis and ontology prototyping aiming to classify Scientific Conferences: the OntoQualis project. Some results of OntoQualis preliminary evaluation have shown a satisfactory classification level in comparison with CAPES-QUALIS ranking.

Web-adaptive training system based on cognitive student style

This paper presents the results of the Project ‘Tapejara’ — intelligent training system on the intemet, a Brazilian Research Council funded project with a partnership of two universities and a Telecom company. This research project uses the students’ cognitive learning styles (CLS) to customise course presentation. The CLS is acquired from a sample of telecommunication organisation employees. Individual CLSs are correlated with the students’ learning trajectories, allowing automated style identification. Based on the CLS identification, an intelligent agent generates the best-adapted content presentation for each student.

Discovering Web usage patterns for modeling learner's cognitive abilities

The study described in the present paper is part of a wider research that has developed an adaptive environment for Web-based learning - AdaptWeb/spl reg/. The paper focuses on the investigation of the learners cognitive ability level (CAL) modeling based on the cognitive behavior during the learning process. It is based on high order thinking abilities according to Blooms taxonomy. The investigation attempts to define the indicators of navigational behavior that could better discriminate the CAL classes defined. The learners behavior assessment was performed by the analysis of the Web actions carried out in a free navigation content module. In order to accomplish our objective we have adopted an exploratory empirical and inductive research framework. We expect that the main benefit resulting from the adjustment of the instructional presentation to the learners CAL characteristic is the possibility of designing pedagogical strategies and didactic tactics that provide the learner with an in-depth learning and more complex thinking.