A Semantic Web Framework for Generating Collaborative E-learning Environments

In this paper we present a semantic web framework that can be used to generate web-based, e-learning and e-assessment environments for any given knowledge domain. We accomplish this by generating "learning ontologies" for a given knowledge domain. The generated learning ontologies are built upon our previous work on domain "Glossary" ontology and augmented with additional conceptual relations from the WordNet 3.0 lexical database, using Text2Onto, an open source ontology extraction tool. The main novelty of this work is in "on the fly" generation of e-assessments based on the underlying ontology and predefined question templates that are founded on the Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. The main deployment scenario for the framework is a web-service providing collaborative e-learning and knowledge management capabilities to various learning communities.