Contexts as Abstraction of Grouping

This paper presents a framework of context-centered digital course libraries founded on the Topic Maps paradigm and used for developing an authoring environment for building such libraries. We explore the idea of using contexts to support more efficient information search. The notion of context is perceived as abstraction of grouping of domain concepts and resources based on the existing semantic relationships between them. The suggested framework implies a layered information structure of the library content consisting of three layers, each capturing a different aspect of the information space- conceptual, resource-related, and contextual. The proposed model of context is used for context representation in the TM4L environment, which enables the creation, maintenance, and use of ontology-aware courseware based on Topic Maps.