An architecture for combining semantic web techniques with intelligent tutoring systems

There are several possible applications of Semantic Web techniques in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and important advantages can be obtained from their application. This paper presents an architecture to combine Semantic Web techniques with ITSs, explaining its elements, relationships, challenges, and the different design criterions, offering some guidelines to make decisions when different implementation solutions are possible. We have implemented an instance of this architecture using the XTutor ITS and the CWM (Closed World Machine) Semantic Web reasoner. The implemented framework permits personalization of problems with hints for students. The paper also describes this specific implementation of the general architecture as well as some user adaptation examples with the implemented framework.