An Ontological Approach for Design and Evaluation of Tutoring Systems

Abstract

People are used to dealing with paper and textual documents. Nonetheless the satisfactory principles for those documents are mostly not transposable to numeric and multimedia ones. Authors do not know how to design software and users do not know how to evaluate their relevancy. Since the domain is still emerging we do not have rules stating on the characteristics an ITS should fulfil. We quickly understood that computer science was just a small part of the domain, but after having explored several areas such as human-machine interface, multimedia, scenarios, and pedagogy we still can not precisely and totally solve the question. We nevertheless intend to submit an answer, being aware that it would be nothing but a point of view on the problem and not an absolute description. We wanted the knowledge we gathered to be represented and organised so that it could be a statement of the existing reality, sharable by various actors of the domain, effortlessly usable and reusable, easily evolving. These requirements fit with the concept of ontology in AI