Ontology-Based User Competencies Modeling for E-Learning Recommender Systems
Mihaela Brut, Florence Sèdes, Corinne Amel Zayani · IGI Global eBooks · 2009
Inside the e-learning platforms, it is important to manage the user competencies profile and to recommend to each user the most suitable documents and persons, according to his or her acquired knowledge, to their long-term interests, but also according to his very current goals. The authors of this chapter explore a Semantic Web-based modeling approach for the document annotations and user competencies profile development, based on the same domain ontology set. The ontologies constitute the binder between the materials and users. For the user profile development and for the personalized recommendations facilities, the authors’ solution propose a hybrid recommender approach: first the user navigation inside the ontology is monitored (instead of user navigation inside the e-learning platform) and the next concept of interest is recommended through a collaborative filtering method; then a content-based recommendation of documents is provided to the user, according the selected concept and his competencies profile. In both phases, a variant of the nearest neighbor algorithm is applied.