E-learning content management: An ontology-based approach

Scarcity of E-Learning content being a barrier for ELearning is no longer true on today's Internet. The current concerns are how to effectively annotate and organize available content (both textual and non-textual) to facilitate effective sharing, reusability and customization in an intelligent fashion. In this paper, we explain a component-oriented approach to organize content in an ontology. We also illustrate our 3-Tier E-Learning Content Management Architecture and relevant Web Services and Interfaces. We use a simple yet intuitive example to successfully demonstrate the current working prototype which is capable of compiling personalized course materials on a particular topic (e.g., "Database") on-the-fly. The prototype uses the Pellet Semantic Web Reasoner as an inference engine to satisfy the constraints and criteria specified by a user (through browser based interface) or an agent (via Web Service API), and retrieves relevant content from the domain ontology in an organized fashion.