DEVELOPMENT OF A VISUAL SEMANTIC WEB ONTOLOGY BASED LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Abstract

This paper specifically aim at developing a visual semantic web ontology based e-Learning management system. The existing e-learning platforms have failed to address some challenges including managing the huge e-Learning content that is continuously grows on the web, meeting the learner's requirements when searching for an electronic learning content, representing the knowledge in a format that is easy to read and making it capable of thinking and thus allowing the re-use of e-Learning objects. In addition, most search results contain some irrelevant documents that cannot serve the need of the learner. Therefore, this thesis designed a common interface for learners, instructors, and administrators of academic institutions to upload and access learning materials. The new system created an ontology repository to maintain learners’ personalization details and taxonomy of the learning resources and integrate the knowledge embedded in many remote ontologies for improved e -Learning management system. In addition, an intelligent search engine through which learners can semantically search their learning materials and filter the search results returned by the search engine based on some semantics and the user’s preferences created. These designs simulated using a web-system developed with PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. The System Design followed the Object Oriented Design and Analysis Methodology for componentization of the system modules giving room for coupling, decoupling, modification, encapsulation and reuse, as well as easy maintainability. Unified Modeling Language extensively used to simplify the explanation of the system modules. The software performance wastested; the result shows that visual semantic web ontology-based e-Learning management system achieved 95% accuracy in returning the desired web search result.