Ontology-Based Personalization of Hypermedia Courses

In the context of increasing need of life-long training, a major issue is the development of supports for personalized access to learning objects (resources, models and services) in order to reuse them in a particular training. Markup of learning objects with ontology-based metadata will allow reutilization and personalization. This paper presents OrPAF, an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia and web-based System (AEHS). The key feature of OrPAF is a learning ontology that formally specifies learning knowledge used to describe different classical learning models (domain model, pedagogical model and learner model). The learning ontology is semi-automatically constructed and permits to effectively adapt the system OrPAF to different training needs (a new domain/discipline, a new pedagogical strategy, new learner profiles, etc.). Based on its learning ontology, OrPAF generates an adaptive hypermedia course. The structure of the hypermedia is a graph of relevant domain learning concepts and the pages of the hypermedia are the relevant resources queried from external web repositories. Semantic annotations and a semantic relevance measure are proposed in order to identify the relevance of the external learning resources.