Conceptualization of Teaching Material

The Internet and World Wide Web are being used as support aids to facilitate the delivery of teaching and learning materials. The content of the related courses taught at different universities and organizations tend to be strikingly similar. The gains resulted by sharing the teaching material are high. The problem here is that most systems use different formats, languages and vocabularies to represent and to store these resources. Hence there is no way for two different applications to interoperate even if their teaching contents belong to the same domain and so the knowledge exposed by one cannot be used by another. A possible solution to the problem of sharing and reuse of learning resources is to have a shared vocabulary. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and heterogeneous application systems. An important aspect of interoperability of learning objects is a common format for describing content. In this thesis, ontologies for the teaching material is developed. Ontologies for the content and metadata of teaching material is developed. Metadata helps people organize, find, and use resources effectively. The IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) was developed to provide structured metadata descriptions of learning resources called Learning Objects in order to enable semantic interoperability among applications on the e-learning domain. The metadata properties adequate for this application are used from IEEE LOM. If the applications share the common ontology of teaching material then the teaching material of one application can be used by another, it also provides intelligent integration such as sharing, searching and reusing information among applications.