Leveraging Folksonomies for Ontology Evolution in E-learning Environments

Abstract

One of the main obstacles for wider adoption of semantic rich e-learning systems is the difficulty in creating and maintaining domain ontologies describing courses. Annotations, such as those resulting from collaborative tagging, provide a new source of information which can be used to ease the process of author-ing and updating domain ontologies. This paper presents an extension to the LOCO-Analyst tool, which leverages student folksonomies to support instructors when revising and updating course domain ontologies. The support is based on a computation of relatedness between ontology concepts and students tags which takes into account the "context" defined by the domain ontology. The computed scores are visualized in a tag cloud along with tag popularity scores, to allow instructors to easily comprehend the emergent feedback of their students. This approach allows for a simple and intuitive method for instructors to associate tags with concepts in their domain ontology.