Ontology-driven Elearning System in Support of Knowledge Gathering

The Semantic Web technologies have been used in many educational projects over the last few years. As ontologies are the best known knowledge representation mechanism, allowing both humans and machines to model and work with knowledge, their usage in eLearning systems is of great importance for achieving a high quality learning and authoring process. In this paper we make a brief exploration of eLearning projects, using ontologies and propose a model of an open eLearning system, using ontologies for knowledge representation, sharing, reusing, integration and reasoning. We discuss the strengths and drawbacks of the model; outline the main areas of an effective ontology application in eLearning and its role in achieving better educational quality.