Description of an instructional ontology and its application in web services for education

In the last years, important steps have been under-taken to bring the e-learning web to its full poten-tial. In this paper, I describe an ontology that can serve as a further step in this direction. The ontol-ogy captures the instructional function of a learn-ing resource, in other words, its “essence ” from a teaching/learning perspective, an aspect not yet covered by learning object metadata standards. It offers the well-known advantages of ontologies: it can provide humans with a shared vocabulary and can serve as the basis for the semantic interoper-ability for machines. The article motivates the need for such an ontology and describes several educa-tional Web services that can benefit from it. To exemplify the generality of the ontology, the arti-cle describes how the ontology can be mapped onto several knowledge representations currently used in e-learning systems