Knowledge-based Links for Automatic Interaction with Programming Online Judges

Programming online judges are computing resources with pre-designed test data. Recently, an increasing attention has been paid on integration of online judges into a tutoring system. However, it is difficult for a local system to automatic interaction with remote online judges on the web to share their computation, because these computing resources are designed for human users only. To address such issue, a novel link is proposed here, called framed link, which consists of a frame-based representation for the knowledge about how to interact with the computing resource that the link points to. With the framed link, three remote online judges including their internal test data are integrated successfully into a local system for programming courses.