Resource Description Framework Based Intelligent Tutoring System Muhammad Azeem Abbas, Wan Fatimah Wan Ahmad 1 , Khairul Shafee Kalid 2 Computer & Information Sciences Department, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia azeem.abbas@uaar.edu.pk, 1 fatimhd@petronas.com.my, 2 khairulshafee_kalid@petronas.com.my Abstract-Intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a contribution from Artificial Intelligence domain. It is an expert system that has a very effective role in modern education. It facilitates both teachers and students in teaching or learning of some concept of a domain. Despite of large number of benefits from ITS, yet very few people have experienced it in real environment. It is primarily due to high complexity of ITS development requirements. Modeling the correct and consistent domain knowledge that supports both pedagogical and software development activities and ITS user friendly interface creates this complexity. An ITS is proposed for pre-school curriculum that models the domain using Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS). In present work formal details of domain or knowledge modeling are provided and demonstrated the application of proposed modeling with the prototype results. Proposed domain modeling approach provides ease to both development activities and user friendly interface; also it models a complete and consistent domain. Keyword-Intelligent tutoring system, RDF/RDFS, preschool education. I. INTRODUCTION Effectiveness of intelligent tutoring system (ITS) has been shown by several empirical studies. It is well known that teaching with state-of-the-art technology to low- profile students increases student’s performance, sometimes even higher than high-profile students [1]. Similarly teaching a concept is rather less time taking with the use of technology. Intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a contribution from Artificial Intelligence domain [2] ITS is an expert system that has a very effective role in modern education. It facilitates both teachers and students in teaching and learning of some concept of the domain. Some ITS found in literature are SCHOLAR [3], GUIDON [4], PIXIE [5], EPILIST I & II [6,7], ASPIRE [8,9] and Nussbaum et al. [10]. Benefits from ITS are countless. Yet, too few students experience those benefits because development of a sound and complete ITS for any real domain is very complex. Also the complexity of development activities of an ITS makes it a resource demanding process. Several expertise such as knowledge management, artificial intelligence, psychology, education and cognitive science are required to develop an ITS. This complexity arises primarily because of domain modeling. Every ITS require some knowledge that is modeled in machine-understandable structure to support teaching and learning activities. This knowledge is the domain knowledge that support ITS to generate learning contents and also evaluate student’s solutions. The modeled knowledge must also support pedagogical activities or the teaching strategies. In general there are two teaching strategies: instructional and constructive. Most of the available ITSs work for instructional strategies. Instructional strategies are teacher-centered, where teacher defines and delivers learning contents to the students using an ITS. In contrast, constructive strategies are student-centered, where student is exposed to the situation or environment that constructs his/her internal knowledge [10]. Creating such situations and environment within ITS is more difficult than ITSs operating for instructional strategies. In section II we provide a review to several knowledge modeling approaches found in literature. Presentation of learning contents also effects modeling complexity of the domain knowledge [11]. Some ITSs use sophisticated graphical user interfaces or some operates over shell to reduce the knowledge burden. From a developer’s perspective, manipulating domain knowledge to a presentable learning content is itself a complex activity. Another important requirement of any ITS is that it should be designed for non-programmers or users without software development experience [10]. So the user of an ITS make use of stored knowledge through some interface to generate the required learning content. Currently authoring a learning content require ten times more time than its conductance. An ITS that models the complete and consistent domain knowledge that provides supports to pedagogical activities and software developers as well, with user friendly non- programming interface and generates and evaluate learning contents within real time should become the ultimate ITS. In present work a modeling approach is proposed that utilizes Resource Description Framework (RDF) to model domain knowledge. We demonstrate here with a case study that our proposed modeling approach supports both teaching strategies and presentation issues. As a case study we demonstrate modeling of pre-school curriculum. We implemented a prototype (intelligent tutoring system) named Self Learner Tutor (SLT) that is built upon our proposed knowledge modeling approach. Section II provides literature review that contain previously proposed modeling approaches for ITS, Section III presents our proposed modeling technique, later pre- school curriculum as case study is presented in Section IV and finally conclusion, results and prototype details in last section. 978-1-4673-1938-6/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE