A Teaching Strategies Engine Using Translation from SWRL to Jess

Abstract

Within an intelligent tutoring system framework, the teaching strategy engine stores and executes teaching strategies. A teaching strategy is a kind of procedural knowledge, generically an if-then rule that queries the learner’s state and performs teaching actions. We develop a concrete implementation of a teaching strategy engine based on an automatic conversion from SWRL to Jess. This conversion consists of four steps: (1) SWRL rules are written using Protégé’s SWRLTab editor; (2) the SWRL rule portions of Protégé’s OWL file format are converted to SWRLRDF format via an XSLT stylesheet; (3) SweetRules converts SWRLRDF to CLIPS/Jess format; (4) syntax-based transformations are applied using Jess meta-programming to provide certain extensions to SWRL syntax. The resulting rules are then added to the Jess run-time environment. We demonstrate this system by implementing a scenario with a set of learning contents and rules, and showing the run-time interaction with a learner.