Toshinobu Kasai

A Semantic Web system for supporting teachers using ontology alignment

In Japan, it is important to provide teachers of Information Technology Education (IT) with a powerful help system that can locate and provide access to a variety of useful information resources. To this end, we built an ontology of the goal of IT education and its applications based on Semantic Web technology. This application was based on the alignment of ontologies to reuse the results of other research. Furthermore, we propose a Goal Transition Model to show a skeleton of the transition of instructional goals based on ontologies. Finally, we propose support functions that are used in the model.

Building an ontology of IT education goals

In Japan, the interest in IT education is continuously growing. Most goals of the IT education involve metaability, which cannot be learned by the traditional Japanese instructional methods. It is difficult to design effective IT education material. Moreover, there are only a few specialists in IT education. For this reason, it is necessary and important to provide IT instructors with a powerful help system that can locate and provide access to a variety of useful information resources. We present a system that reconstructs the resources according to the various viewpoints expressed in the ontology of IT education goals. Further, we propose an ontology alignment framework.