HOW SEMANTICS CAN IMPROVE E-LEARNING TOOLS Abraham Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Laura Cruz-García, Concepción Hernández-Guerra, Francisca Quintana-Domínguez University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Canary Islands, Spain ABSTRACT This paper presents an environment for the English language learning whose main feature consists in using Semantic Web (SW) technology extensively. We intend to enhance the quality of the services provided by current e-learning platforms, by integrating some of their capabilities with the potential of the SW. The new tool, called Language Training Gate (LTG), should be considered as an extension of current Web applications, in which all the information is semantically labelled, using multiple ontologies that describe all the components and actors of an educational environment. The objective is to facilitate the collaborative work between people and machines through the implementation of intelligent agents that operate with semantic information. KEYWORDS e-learning, semantic-web, ontologies. 1. BACKGROUND Relan and Gillani (1997) consider the e-learning process as the application of multiple instructive strategies cognitively focused and carried out in a constructionist and collaborative learning environment using internet resources. Urdan and Weggen (2000) claim that the number of learning activities on the internet increases by about 20% every four years. There is no doubt that e-learning has become one of the main studied issues in many fields, and not exclusively in Computer Science. However, in spite of the availability of many complex educational environments, it seems that the technological layer on which they are founded (i.e the current Web) limits the development of new services that impel the evolution of the educational process. The SW technology facilitates the development of new services that could reduce teachers’ workload in tedious or repetitive tasks and are transparent to the students. The W3C consortium states that ‘The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries’ 1 . It can also be defined as ‘an extension of the current Web, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation’ (Berners-Lee, 2001.) The SW idea was first stated by Tim Berners-Lee from the W3C and its Metadata Activity Group. This initiative was replaced by the Semantic Web in 2000, and some others, such as SW Advance Development, SWAD Europe, RDF, or OWL. In order to use the SW, languages allowing us to specify semantic information are required. The development of meta-vocabularies (terminologies or high-level ontologies) will also facilitate the communication between descriptions created by different actors or entities. Specialized query languages that work with SW description languages (RDF-like) will enhance the searching abilities of current www robots. Once all these tools are available, agents can be developed to manage semantic information in order to provide new services, such as brokering, electronic sales or information search. Among the different definitions of the term ontology, the one given by Gruber (1993), and later completed by Studer et al. (1998), is the most accepted: An Ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. An ontology is usually represented by a taxonomy of hierarchically organised terms, together with transversal relations among them. Its objective is to make an abstract model of some phenomena in the world explicit (conceptualization). ‘Explicit specification’ means that the different 1 http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ ISBN: 972-8924-19-4 © 2006 IADIS 364