Ontology Mapping and Rule-Based Inference for Learning Resource Integration

Abstract

With the increasing demand for interoperability among existing learning resource systems in order to enable the sharing of learning resources, such resources need to be annotated with ontologies that use different metadata standards. These different ontologies must be reconciled through ontology mediation, so as to cope with information heterogeneity problems, such as semantic and structural conflicts. In this paper, we propose an ontology-mapping technique using Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to generate semantic mapping rules that integrate learning resources from different systems and that cope with semantic and structural conflicts. Reasoning rules are defined to support a semantic search for heterogeneous learning resources, which are deduced by rule-based inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach enables the integration of learning resources originating from multiple sources and helps users to search across heterogeneous learning resource systems.