A SEMANTIC WEB FRAMEWORK FOR GENERATING COLLABORATIVE E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS A Semantic Web Framework for Generating Collaborative E-learning Environments

Abstract—In this paper we present a semantic web frame-work that can be used to generate web-based, e-learning and e-assessment environments for any given knowledge do-main. We accomplish this by generating “learning ontolo-gies ” for a given knowledge domain. The generated learning ontologies are built upon our previous work on domain “Glossary ” ontology and augmented with additional concep-tual relations from the WordNet 3.0 lexical database, using Text2Onto, an open source ontology extraction tool. The main novelty of this work is in “on the fly ” generation of e-assessments based on the underlying ontology and pre-defined question templates that are founded on the Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. The main deployment scenario for the framework is a web-service providing col-laborative e-learning and knowledge management capabili-ties to various learning communities. Index Terms—collaborative e-learning, e-assessment, learn-ing ontologies, web services I