An extensible and lightweight modular ontology for programming education

Abstract

Semantic web technologies such as ontologies can foster the reusability of learning material by introducing common sets of concepts for annotation purposes. However, suggesting learning material from an open, heterogeneous corpus is a nontrivial problem. In this paper, we propose an extensible and lightweight modular ontology for programming education. Its main purpose is to integrate annotated learning material related to programming into an IDE such as Eclipse. Our ontology is based on a modular architecture, which is extensible with respect to different programming languages. Aligning language-specific concepts with user-specific tags allows us to suggest learning resources for code elements in a fine-grained and cross-curricular way. Our concrete implementation establishes relations between learning aspects in Java or C code and annotated resources such as articles on online question-and-answer sites.