Intelligent educational environments based on the semantic Web technologies

Abstract

The advanced educational technologies and environments must provide personalized learning services within broad spectrum of user needs. The Semantic Web is considered to be a promising way to meet this requirement. In this paper the main directions of eLearning systems evolution and stages of each direction are defined. The roles of ontologies and intelligent agents in such systems are recognized. We identify and describe five layers of ontologies needed in future eLearning systems. Different levels of educational queries and scenarios of its processing are considered. An approach to constructing a personalized learning program based on the Semantic Web technologies is proposed. To ensure the maximal flexibility the eLearning system is organized as a multi-agent system (MAS) composed by three kind of agents: student agent, search agent and course constructing agent. In conclusion some MAS software implementation issues are briefly considered.