subject: Semantics (e-learning) [print this page] Knowledge a facilitator is usually defined as a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information (Davenport and Prusak, 1998). E-Learning is just-in-time education integrated with high velocity value chains. It is the delivery of individualized, comprehensive, dynamic learning content in real time, aiding the development of communities of knowledge, linking learners and practitioners with experts. The principle behind E-Learning is that the tools and knowledge needed to perform work are moved to the workers wherever and whoever they are. Simply put, e-Learning revolves around people. This is in stark contrast to the way learning has typically involved people flocking around the learning, i.e. a typical scholastic environment.
The Semantic Web constitutes an environment in which human and machine agents will communicate on a semantic basis. Pedagogically relevant information on present web is ambiguous, not context specific and timely access to significant pieces of information is knotty so a call for a platform is in need which provides fresh and relevant material to its users. There are relatively fewer platforms which provide accessibility of academic studies in such a way that student, teachers could interact directly from all parts of the world.
Semantic web technologies is providing means to teachers ,students and authors to bridge the gap thats present in todays learning environment . Semantic Web encompasses efforts in building an architecture that supports content with formal semantics. Formal semantics means, content suitable for automated systems to consume, as opposed to content intended for human consumption. This will enable automated agents to reason about Web content, and produce an intelligent response to unforeseen situations. The new generation of the web, the so-called Semantic Web, appears as a promising technology for implementing frameworks for E-Learning.
The evolution on educational technologies in the last decade has forced an extraordinary interest in new methods for delivering learning content to learners. The role of technology was overestimated several times causing a myopic consideration of the critical issues in e learning. As a term Ontology has an intrinsic holistic character and is quite interesting to investigate ways of understanding the phenomenon of e-learning from several perspectives.
Several existing architectures of e-learning systems are either based on plain client-server or peer-to-peer architectures; thus suffering from the hitch like poor scalability or complicated interchanges of content. The e-learning platform will ensure an interactive communication with proper representation of knowledge with the help of ontological models which serve as basis for shared understanding. The recompense of such architecture is that it proposes the usage of intelligent software agents for the distributed retrieval of educational content. It encapsulates the content inside a Web Service to increase interoperability and reusability. In addition the different components are implemented as Web Services which allow the system components and content to be distributed all over the web and offered by different vendors.The problem of the extraction of content in the distributed environment is addressed by using the intelligent software agents; as they take into consideration both the preferences of the users, along with the data stored inside services.
The use of Semantic Web technologies for improving the state of art in E-learning. Besides the basic problems ,e-learning amalgamated with semantic web tries to bridge the learning gaps present between various entities (students, teachers, administrators) and make the learning content such that its available and relevant to what has been searched for.
