Using ontology for personalised course recommendation applications

Abstract

The primary data source for universities and courses for students is increasingly becoming the web, and with a vast amount of information about thousands of courses on different websites, it is quite a task to find one that matches a student’s needs. That is why we are proposing the “Course Recommendation System”, a system that suggests the course best suited for prospective students. As there has been a huge increase in course content on the Internet, finding the course you really need has become time-consuming, so we are proposing to use an ontology-based approach to semantic content recommendation. The aim is to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of providing students with suitable recommendations. The recommender takes into consideration knowledge about the user (the student’s profile) and course content, as well as knowledge about the domain that is being learned. Ontology is used to both models and represent such forms of knowledge. There are four steps to this: extracting information from multiple sources, applying ontologies by using Protégé tools, semantic relevance calculation and refining the recommendation. A personalised, complete and augmented course is then suggested for the student, based on these steps.