2010-04-14 Sem eMadrid Oscar Martínez EDUCON2010

1. An Approach for Description of
Open Educational
Resources based on Semantic
Technologies
Nelson Piedra, Janneth Chicaiza, Jorge López
Escuela Ciencias Computación, Universidad Técnica Particular Loja,
Ecuador
Oscar Martínez Bonastre, Centro de Investigación Operativa
Universidad Miguel Hernández, España
Edmundo Tovar Caro, Facultad de Informática, Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid, España
IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

2. Outline
• Introduction
• OER: Using metadata and Ontologies
• OER-CC ontology: Development process
• OER-CC: Instantiation and Retrieval
– Instantiation process
– Information Retrieval
• Conclusions
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

3. Introduction
• Open Educational Resources (OERs) initiatives
promote their global exchange with the aim of
increasing the human intellectual capacity.
• Technology in general, and specifically Web,
provides an interesting opportunity for people to
get key competences while they´re using or
even also sharing digital contents.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

4. Introduction
• OER are teaching, learning, research digital resources and tools,
which are available on the public domain or have been released
under an intellectual property license, i.e., they allow their free use
or even also be reusable by others.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

5. Introduction
We hypothesized that growth of OER data repository should
make difficult to find out information of value, i.e, it reduces
possibilities of sharing educational resources.
Consequently, we evaluated some solutions like
• Using semantic technologies to describe OER could enable any
agent (human or software-based) to process and understand
content (applying inference rules to structured knowledge)
• Metadata standards could be used to annotate OER, i.e., they´d
improve their interoperability and discovery of knowledge.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

6. OER: Using metadata and
Ontologies
• The Open Educational Resources Initiatives are
based on Open Access (OA) movement.
• OER Projects can be classified according to
used model (funding, technical, content and
staffing) to ensure their sustainability.
– producer-consumer models
– Co-production models
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

7. OER: Using metadata and
Ontologies
• Using semantics in OER Production
– Semantic technologies would automate or semi-
automate certain educative tasks through “synergy
between human and machines”
– People are the producers and customers: they are the
source of knowledge and they request information
also.
– Machines are the enablers: they store and remember
data, search and combine data, draw mathematical
and logical inferences, etc.”
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

8. OER: Using metadata and
Ontologies
• Using semantics in OER Production
– Semantic technologies could automate certain educative tasks
through “synergy between human and machines”
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

9. OER: Using metadata and
Ontologies
• Using semantics in OER Production
– To achieve these objectives, OER should be described by a standard
schema in a way that any agent (human or software-based) could
understand and processing its content.
• Metadata Standards for Educational Material standards:
– The IEEE LTSC (Learning Technology Standard Committee) developed IEEE
LOM (Learning Object Metadata).
– The IMS GLC (Global Learning Consortium) proposes IMS Learning Resource
Metadata.
– Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
• Ontologies:
– METHONTOLOGY
– On-To-Knowledge
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

10. OER: Using metadata and
Ontologies
• Using semantics in OER Production
– Gruber’s principles:
• Clarity, coherence, extendibility, minimal encoding bias and minimal
ontological commitment; the idea is to ensure the “knowledge sharing”.
• To fulfill these criteria, ontology evaluation should be performed during
development process.
• Different types of evaluation:
– Syntactic evaluation, to check languages specification
– Semantic evaluation, focused on detecting if ontologies have inconsistencies and
redundancies respectively
– Lexical evaluation, it refers to the vocabulary used to represent concepts and
domain relationships.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

11. OER: Using metadata and
Ontologies
• Using semantics in OER Production
– Describing Objects and Learning Resources:
Metadata Standards.
• Semantic representation of LO: LOM2OWL ontology. Its
structure allows to describe LOs using IEEE LOM standard.
• Description of works licensed under Creative Commons: CC
published the metadata standard ccREL (Creative Commons
Rights Expression Language). It aims to "make licensed
works more reusable and easy to find".
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

12. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Main goals:
– To describe OER and CC resources using a
common vocabulary by users and producers,
i.e., an implemented ontology offered to
students and lecturers within an educational
context.
– To automate execution of tasks such as
information retrieval using semantic web
techniques.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

13. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Process and tools to build OER-CC ontology
– OER ontology development.
– CC ontology development.
– Merging CC and OER ontologies.
As a result, we unified concepts, terminology, definitions
and constraints from both ontologies successfully.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

14. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Process and tools to build OER-CC
ontology
– Development process was based on
METHONTOLOGY guidelines.
• This method proposes an ontology building life
cycle based on evolving prototypes.
• It allows adding, changing and removing terms
through each new version (prototype).
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

15. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

16. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Process and tools to build OER-CC
ontology
– Once we had decided how to describe
metadata, we selected well-referenced tools
to model OER-CC ontology.
– Concretely, we used CMaptools to represent
and connect both knowledge domains, i.e.,
OER and CC respectively.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

17. OER-CC ontology: Concept Map
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

18. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Process and tools to build OER-CC ontology
– Cmaptools Ontology Editor (COE) was used for constructing,
sharing and viewing modeled ontology based on CmapTools.
– We selected COE to model OER-CC ontology using OWL
language.
– Protégé was used for implementing our ontology formally.
Additionally, all prior results were imported to this ontology
editor.
– We used SWRL for deductive and reasoning capabilities and
SPARQL for retrieval of educational resources metadata.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

19. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Instantiation process and tools
– Population process “creates a knowledge base
including instances of the ontology concepts and
instances of the ontology relations”
– This process can occur in 3 different ways:
• Manual
• Semi-automatic,
• Automatic,
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

20. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• OER-CC Ontology Instantation
– To instantiate our OER-CC ontology, we considered some
resources generated in the Computer Science School (CSS) of
the Technical University of Loja (Universidad Técnica Particular
de Loja23, UTPL-Ecuador)
– At this point, manual process was selected to populate OER-CC
ontology with the CSS' educational resources,
– Instantiation of CC domain was considered using different types
of Creative Commons Licenses with jurisdiction at Ecuador.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

21. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Information Retrieval
– We used SPARQL language for knowledge
retrieval of our OER-CC ontology.
– Thus, we developed some queries to retrieve
information, e.g., properties of OERs and CC
licenses. Initial results showed that our OER-
CC ontology has been deployed successfully,
i.e., using metadata from initial instantiation of
educational objects.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

22. OER-CC ontology: Development
process
• Information Retrieval
– Implemented query using SPARQL: Which are direct
contributions of the UTPL at OERs production? and
which are indirect contributions through their
teachers/students?
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

23. Conclusions
– As a main contribution, we have introduced OER-CC ontology
to model knowledge from OER and CC domains
respectively.
– Secondly, we have been able to inference knowledge using our
OER-CC ontology, i.e., through classification of educational
objects.
– About work in progress, we continue improving OER-CC
ontology. We are deploying methods to promote accessibility
oriented to OER user requirements, e.g., the content of an
educational resource could be ranked within the OER-CC
ontology according to student or lecturer profile respectively.
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education

24. Thank you for your attention
Questions
• IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2010 – The Future of Global Learning Engineering Education