Ontology based E-learning framework: A personalized, adaptive and context aware model Sohail Sarwar 1 & Zia Ul Qayyum 1 & Raúl García-Castro 2 & Muhammad Safyan 1 & Rana Faisal Munir 3 Received: 27 August 2018 /Revised: 8 June 2019 /Accepted: 13 August 2019 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Enhancing the degree of learner productivity, one of the major challenges in E-Learning systems, may be catered through effective personalization, adaptivity and context awareness while recommending the learning contents to the learners. In this paper, an E-Learning framework has been proposed that profiles the learners, categorizes the learners based on profiles, makes personalized content recommendations and performs assessment based content adaptation. A mathematical model has been proposed for learner categorization using machine learning techniques (a hybrid of case based reasoning and neural networks). The learning contents have been annotated through CourseOntology in which three academic courses (each for language of C++, C# and JAVA) have been modeled for the learners. A dynamic rule based recommender has been presented targeting a ‘relative grading system’ for maximizing the learner’ s productivity. Performance of proposed framework has been measured in terms of accurate learner categorization, personalized recommendation of the learning contents, com- pleteness and correctness of ontological model and overall performance improvement of learners in academic sessions of 2015, 2016 and 2017. The comparative analysis of proposed framework exhibits visibly improved results compared to prevalent approaches. These im- provements are signified to the comprehensive attribute selection in learner profiling, dynamic techniques for learner categorization and effective content recommendation while ensuring personalization and adaptivity. Keywords Ontologies . E-Learning . Personalization . Adaptivity . Content Recommender 1 Introduction The perceptible dominance of internet has affected every aspect of human life that can specifically be observed on academic landscape in the form of Electronic Learning (or “E- Multimedia Tools and Applications https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08125-8 * Sohail Sarwar sohail.sarwar@seecs.edu.pk Extended author information available on the last page of the article