The use of ontologies in ITS domain knowledge authoring

Acquiring the domain knowledge is a task that requires a major portion of the time and effort when building an ITS. Researchers have been exploring ways of automating the knowledge acquisition process since the inception of ITSs with limited success. All past research attempts have focussed on acquiring knowledge for procedural domains. Our goal is to develop an authoring system that acquires knowledge for procedural as well as non-procedural domains. We propose a four phase approach: composing an ontology of the domain, extracting syntax constraint from it, learning semantic constraints from the examples provided by the domain expert and finally verifying the generated constraints. This paper presents an overview of the knowledge acquisition system for acquiring knowledge for constraint-based tutors. It mainly focusses on composing the ontology and acquiring syntax constraints from it. Further work on this project will focus on learning from examples and validating the generated constraints.