The MATHESIS Semantic Authoring Framework: Ontology-Driven Knowledge Engineering for ITS Authoring

This paper describes the MATHESIS semantic authoring framework being developed within the MATHESIS project. The project aims at an intelligent authoring environment for reusable model-tracing tutors. The framework has three components: an intelligent web-based model-tracing algebra tutor, an ontology and a set of authoring tools. The tutor serves as a prototype for the development of the ontology. The purpose of the ontology is to provide a semantic and therefore inspectable and re-usable representation of the declarative and procedural authoring knowledge necessary for the development of any model-tracing tutor, as well as of the declarative and procedural knowledge of the specific tutor under development. The procedural knowledge is represented via the process model of the OWL-S web services description ontology. Based on such an ontological representation, a suite of authoring tools is being developed at the final stage of the project.