ePlanning: An Ontology-based System for Building Individualized Education Plans for Students with Special Educational Needs

The Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is a document that defines academic/life goals for a pupil with special educational needs. The IEP is built specifically for the pupil, and it is the result of a collaborative activity that involves the school special education team, the parents, other relevant educational stakeholders, as well as, whenever possible, the student. In details, an IEP specifies the student academic/life goals and the methods/kind of educational intervention to obtain these goals. The IEP also identifies activities, supports and services that students need for being successful in their school activities in the perspective of the “special normality” principles, as required by the Italian Law 104/92 for students certificated for a disability. Besides the wide employment, in the last years, of IEPs in several Italian schools of any educational level (kindergarten, primary school, middle school, high school), the development of a IEP for a given pupil is a manual, complex and time-consuming activity. To support and facilitate the building of the IEP, we developed a web-based decision support system, called ePlanning: users input relevant aspects of the profile of a pupil (e.g., age, diagnosis, observations) into the system, and based on this content the system guides the users in defining the more appropriate academic/life goals for the pupil, suggesting also activities and educational material that may help in achieving these goals. Semantic Web (SW) technology plays a key role in ePlanning, as well as in its development. First, ePlanning is an ontology-based application, i.e., the content the system uses to support the construction of an IEP is encoded in an OWL 2 ontology, which formalizes: (i) processes, that represent functional abilities; (ii) relevant features of pupil profiles (e.g., age, school grade, a diagnosis in terms of a ICD or ICF code) and their relation with functional abilities; (iii) proposal of goals that can be set in the presence of an impairment of some functional abilities; and, (iv) activities and educational materials that can be used