Ontologies in education – state of the art

Ontologies are used with great success in education because they allow to formulate the representation of a learning domain by specifying all concepts involved, relations between concepts and all properties and conditions that exist. The goal of this paper is to present the field of ontologies and give an overview of recent research in the field, in the context of education. As this paper presents a literature review, papers from the last five years were collected from the IEEE Xplore database, analysed and categorized based on the use of ontologies for: curriculum modelling and management, describing learning domains, learning data, and e-learning services. From the collected papers, a slightly growing trend in the contribution of ontologies to educational systems can be observed. Most studies used ontologies for describing learning domains, and some of the 95 collected papers could not fit in just one category because a system used more than one ontology. Throughout the work, the following contributions have been made: the term ontology was defined, the most common types of ontologies and commonly used methodologies for building ontologies were identified, and an overview of existing systems that use ontologies in the domain of education was given.