Semantic E-Learning Agents - Supporting Elearning by Semantic Web and Agents Technologies

E-learning is starting to play a major role in the learning and teaching activities at institutions of higher education worldwide. The students perform significant parts of their study activities decentralized and access the necessary information sources via the Internet. Several tools have been developed providing basic infrastructures that enable individual and collaborative work in a location-independent and time-independent fashion. Still, systems that adequately provide personalized and permanent support for using these tools are still to come. This paper reports on the advances of the Semantic E-learning Agent (SEA) project, whose objective is to develop virtual student advisors, that render support to university students in order to successfully organize und perform their studies. The E-learning agents are developed with novel concepts of the Semantic Web and agents technology. The key concept is the semantic modeling of the E-learning domain by means of XML-based applied ontology languages such as DAML+OIL and OWL. Software agents apply ontological and domain knowledge in order to assist human users in their decision making processes. For this task, the inference engine JESS is applied in conjunction with the agent framework JADE.