Designing an Ontology for Open Learning Environment

Abstract

Ontologies have become core components of many large applications. One of the more common goals in developing the ontologies is to Share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents. This research addresses the issues of why one would build an ontology and presents a methodology for creating ontologies. The idea is to design an ontology for Open Learning Domain and use it to add information that it becomes possible for computer systems to process information in meaningful and useful way. This research listed the steps of ontology development process, and addressed the complex issues of defining class hierarchies, enumerated the terms that can possibly found in the domain, and then organized them in a hierarchy depending on which class subsumes another. And then defined properties for each class and the relationships linked these classes. Final step in designing the ontology was defining some instances to be able to make queries. After The Ontology has been designed, it sent to the Reasoner to check classes consistency and to compute subsumption relationships. An important result of this research is designing an ontology for Open Learning Domain, explicit representations and full definitions for MOODLE objects, properties and their relationships. Also can make any query to retrieve information about MOODLE. Furthermore, the designed ontology can be shared and reused in applications related to Open Learning Domain.