Ontologies and E-Learning: How to Teach a Classification

Abstract

What is an ontology? Why is this relevant to a learning environment? It is quite well-established in recent investigations on information systems that formal ontologies area crucial problem to deal with, and in fact, received a lot of attention in several different communities, such as knowledge management, knowledge engineering, natural language processing, intelligent information integration, and so on (Fensel, 2000).Ontologies have been developed in artificial intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. The viewpoint we adopt here is taken from the general considerations on the use of philosophical issues in artificial intelligence: “the systematic, formal, axiomatic development of the logic of all forms and modes of being” (Cocchiarella,1991). Another commonly accepted definition is that an ontology is an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization that holds in a particular context.