Semantic (Group Formation)
Asma Ounnas, Hugh Davis, David E. Millard · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2007
MotivationFor decades, group formation has been a subject of study in many domains.In learning, teachers form groups of students for different types of collaborative activities.For the formation to be efficient, teachers need take into account any constraints that can influence the performance of the group as a whole and that of the individuals within the group, such as students' previous experience, gender, nationality, and interests.The formation of groups in this context involves the creation of balanced groups in terms of expected performance in addition to maximizing each individual's goal from the collaboration.As the number of formation's constraints grows, forming groups that satisfy these constraints increases in complexity.We know that the Semantic Web (SW) aims at providing a promising foundation for enriching resources with well defined meanings and making them understandable for programs and applications.The potential of the SW in this context has allowed the semantic formation of social networks to be successful [1].From this point, we trust that the problem of constraint group formation can as well be solved using SW technologies.The question is how to apply the SW vision to the problem, and take the most of its potential to apply it in real life applications such as e-learning.In particular, the problem can be formulated as how can we generate optimal groups by reasoning over possibly incomplete data about the students.