Ontology-based Organizational Memory for e-learning

e-learning leads to evolutions in the way of designing a course. Diffused through the web, the course content cannot be the direct transcription of a face to face course content. A course can be seen as an organization in which different actors are involved. These actors produce documents, information and knowledge that they often share. We present in this paper an ontology-based document-driven memory which is particularly adapted to an e-learning situation. The utility of a shared memory is reinforced in this kind of situation, because the interactions do not usually occur in the same place and in the same time. First we precise our conception of e-learning and we analyze actors needs. Then we present the main features of our learning organizational memory and we focus on the ontologies on which it is based. We consider two kinds of ontologies: the first one is generic and concerns the domain of training; the second one is related to the application domain and is specific to a particular training program. We present our approach for building these ontologies and we show how they can be merged. Finally we describe the learning memory and the prototype we realized for two course units proposed in our universities.