OntoAIMS: ontological approach to courseware authoring

In this paper we discuss how current ontology concepts can be beneficial for more flexible and semantic rich description of the authoring process and for the provision of authoring support of Intelligent Educational Systems (IES) with respect to the three main authoring modules: domain editing, course composition and resource management. We take a semantic perspective on the knowledge representation within such systems and explore the interoperability between the various ontological structures for domain, instructional and resource modeling and the modeling of the entire authoring process. We build upon our research on Authoring Task Ontology and exemplify it within OntoAIMS system. We present authoring scenarios and show their mapping with authoring task ontology. Further we discuss the OntoAIMS framework for management of electronic learning objects (resources) and their usage in the automatic generation of course templates for the authors. Finally, we describe our architecture, based on the ontological specification of the authoring process.