Using Links to Describe Imprecise Relationships in Educational Contents

Hypermedia links describe purposeful relationships between contents, and in consequence, their semantic intention can been modelled by the notion of link type. Ontologies can be used to extend that notion of link type, eventually resulting in shared conceptualizations useful to achieve consistent linking practices. In addition, the relationship embodied by the link is in many cases inherently imprecise, which has been overlooked in existing systems. In this work, we describe how ontologies of link types with support for expressing imprecision can be used to enhance educational Web contents. The computational semantics of the ontology, combined with fuzziness to specify graded relations between pairs of link sources and targets for specific users or groups, enable the implementation of extended adaptive behaviours that may entail inferences and approximate reasoning. An implementation on a SCORM-compliant runtime environment of such kind of extended links is also described, demonstrating their capabilities in the definition of learning-oriented adaptations.