What is Upper Ontology

Modern societies have a growing need for highly specialized education and traditional educational systems have a difficult time providing solutions. E-learning applications could become an important part of the solution. With improvements in network technologies and systems’ scalability, more and more globally-distributed applications are now available. Opportunities for people from varying societies to learn synchronously have thus multiplied. This being said, systems developed in a particular cultural setting and distributed around the world without taking into account variations in learners’ cultural backgrounds pave the way for potential misunderstanding and failure of adequate teaching. How might learners’ cultural background be adequately taken into consideration? How can content displayed to learners be culturally adapted? How can the most suitable strategies of interaction in accordance with learners’ cultural specificities be selected? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this chapter.