PhD Thesis Review: The Usage of Ontologies for the Discovery and Coupling of Learning Active Components

PhD Thesis Review: The Usage of Ontologies for the Discovery and Coupling of Learning Active Componentsby Bogdan IANCUThe "The Usage of Ontologies for the Discovery and Coupling of Learning Active Components" PhD thesis addresses one of the most current and debated themes from the European and international research. The premise from which this research work starts is the idea that a content based search can be more useful in the case of assisted learning and a semantic one can be superior from many points of view.Starting from the results obtained in the past years in the domain of semantic web and by the usage of the emerging technologies based on e-learning ontologies, this PhD thesis has as main objective the creation of an e-learning software platform, that is built according to the latest assisted learning standards and that has major facilities for structuring learning resources, with the help of ontologies. When one chooses his learning domain, the platform automatically identifies the semantic domain to which it belongs to, it automatically selects the key learning concepts and supports the user in creating the learning path.In order to achieve this objective, it was projected and implemented a platform component that is in charge with the continuous information discovery from internet resources, with the scopes of permanently updating the learning materials and building new domains based on conceptual evolution.Internet available educational resources can be automatically found, semantic indexed and combined in such a way in which new knowledge can be produced. All this process can take place unsupervised or with small user interventions, user who doesn't have to have necessary domain knowledge; this is possible because of the latest semantic technologies, standardized by the W3C consortium which include automatic coupling abilities.The author presents an original approach with the scope of defining a learning architecture that combines the simultaneous analysis of representation techniques, classifying methods and already existing ontologies. The survey created with the scope of evaluating the system, confirms the hypothesis regarding the efficiency of combining ontology based search techniques with coupling techniques assisted by the human capacity for defining the learning needs.The thesis starts with a short Introduction, where are presented the economic and social aspects together with some technical considerations that can help him to achieve the proposed objectives. After some key concept definitions and a motivation for choosing the current theme are presented, the author enumerates the main ideas from the eight component chapters.The first chapter called The Role of Learning in Mankind's History presents in its debut the main modern theories related to learning and, after that, continues with the presentation of the type of learning that the thesis is based on, e-learning. After identifying the key classes of e-learning software, the chapter ends with the presentation of a new concept from this domain, gamification. There are illustrated the characteristics of this concept alongside some conclusive examples.The second chapter, Objectives and Research Hypotheses exposes the proposed objectives together with the hypotheses from where the author starts his research. He wants to resolve the problem of discovering intelligent software entities called active components. …