Supporting Online Teaching Laboratories with Semantic Web

This paper presents an ontological design to locate laboratory resources, such as videos, documents, instruments, devices, etc., facilitating collaboration and user customization. A semantic based online laboratory is presented, which gives students and instructors a common access point that can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and which can be customized for user preferences, profile privileges and access limitations. The use of ontologies is the basic mechanism which allows devices and instruments to be defined semantically, rather than by the use of technical concepts. This model can be used in any teaching laboratory. A case study in a networking course is presented; in this, undergraduate students can remotely control instruments and devices. The effectiveness of our approach has been measured and evaluated through usability methods.