Semantic Management Systems for the Material Support of E-learning Platforms

The paper describes a semantic-based system for e-learning platforms, designed to automate some highly time-consuming activities for the account of the cognitive process actors. To this end the system helps the instructor organize the support material for Learning Objects and guides the student in learning the structure of specific knowledge domain. Concerning the first of these aspects, the teacher is required only to indicate the resources in digital format (e-books, documents, Web pages) strictly connected to the lesson topic delivered in a structured way. At the student level, an interaction with a chatbot was analyzed in order to make the research and exploration of content more interactive. The virtual assistant guides the student in understanding structured contexts at different levels of detail (book, chapter, paragraph, sentence and phrase) and their mutual logical organization. The knowledge base was developed on the basis of the Semantic Web paradigm and uses WordNet as reference ontology. A prototype system is currently under test and evaluation at the AeFLab Laboratory of the Politecnico di Bari