Designing a Semantic Portal for Collaborative Learning Communities

This paper presents the design of a semantic portal for collaborative learning communities and describes a persistence mechanism that stores objects enriched with a contextual description. The latter enables the knowledge reutilization in many learning activities and scenarios constituting, as such, a collective memory of the community. The current work is based on two theoretical foundations: the expressive capacity of ontologies, which offers a computer system new possibilities for using the knowledge it contains and the Activity Theory (AT) framework, which permits describing and structuring collaborative learning scenarios.