Web Semantic Technologies in Web Based Educational System Integration

Abstract

Web based e-Education systems are an important kind of information systems that benefited from Web standards for content, implementation, deployment and integration. An e-Education system requires the collaboration of many actors in a complete ecosystem: public authorities (e.g. Ministry) and knowledge engineers, who build official reference standards; teachers and pedagogical engineers, who build digital pedagogical resources; and IT engineers who build digital platforms for e-Learning. In this article we propose and evaluate a Semantic Web approach to support the features and interoperability of a real industrial e-Education system in production. We show how ontology-based knowledge representation supports the required features, their extension to new ones and the integration of external resources (e.g. official standards) as well as interoperability with other systems and knowledge sharing between different actors. Our proof of concept is entirely based on Semantic Web technologies and complies with the industrial constraints; we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated it and performed a benchmark of different alternatives on real data and real queries. We present an in-depth evaluation of the quality of service and response time in this industrial context that shows on a real-world testbed that Semantic Web based solutions can meet the industrial requirements, both in terms of services and efficiency compared to existing operational solutions.