Developing domain ontologies for course content

Abstract

Ontologies have the potential to play an important role in instructional design and the development of course content. They can be used to represent knowledge about content, supporting instructors in creating content or learners in accessing content in a knowledge-guided way. While ontologies exist for many subject domains, their quality and suitability for the educational context might be unclear. For numerous subjects, ontologies do not exist. We present a method for domain experts rather than ontology engineers to develop ontologies for use in the delivery of courseware content. We will focus in particular on relationship types that allow us to model rich domains adequately.