An Ontology of the Object Orientation for Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Abstract

Object Orientated Paradigm (OOP) allows to build software models more maintainable and easier to understand; however, teachers who teach OOP in a beginners course have an extraordinary challenge. There are alternative approaches to traditional teaching such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems; these systems have made use of ontologies to represent domain knowledge. There are some efforts to build ontologies in the OOP area; however, previous proposals are too general or based on concepts of programming without considering the foundations of OOP. So, there is not an ontology with the minimum concepts to be utilized by Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The aim of this work is to develop an ontology that can represent the knowledge of OOP to be used in educational systems. We built the ontology considering part of concepts of an undergraduate course and following the phases: specification, conceptualization, formalization, and implementation. This work acquired a knowledge representation structure to be a significant support to teach courses of Object Orientation based on Intelligent Tutoring Systems.