Semantic Web Approach in Designing a Collaborative E-Item Bank System

Abstract

Existing item bank systems present a variety of assessments for data management and integration with individual learning evaluation systems. However, as the data in these established item bank systems do not include semantics, the bank systems cannot analyze implications and perform accurate searches such as for synonymous words. Therefore, both learners and teachers can access only simple text data using the item bank system and often waste time checking unnecessary search results and extracting information from data repeatedly. Moreover, since there is no clear definition of the relationship between items and teachers or learners, or between data and units, it is difficult to use and share extra-item information. In order to solve these problems, this research describes the definition of conception and organization by constructing the Ontology of an E-Item Bank system using OWL, which is a form of semantic web technology. Furthermore, on the basis of Ontology, OWL metadata, individuals, are built, semantic factors are then extracted using OWLJessKB. We do not only use this extracted semantic factors as a fact, but also domain rules using SWRL for the JESS inferencing engine. As such, it is possible to make inferences and provide reasoning in web data structures. As a result, it is possible to combine all the data of the E-Item bank system and facilitate understanding of the meanings of concepts by the computer. In addition, a search service with inference can be applied to education and can lead to cooperative study between teachers and students.