Course Database : Systematizing Courses Using Ontology Based on the Descriptions of Prerequisite and Acquired Knowledge

Abstract

Because academic fields are becoming increasingly segmented, various faculties here and elsewhere at a university often offer similar courses. Faculties publish syllabus information about their courses, but there are no means to search for this information across faculties. Consequently, it is not possible for students to conduct university-wide searches when they want to attend the most suitable courses outside their faculties, and difficult for faculty members to conduct systematic searches when they want to refer to other courses related to theirs. This problem motivated us to develop a campus-wide syllabus database, "Course Database." To make it possible to identify relationships between independently registered courses, we associated courses with the descriptions of prerequisite and acquired knowledge using a common ontology. Then, we introduced a similarity measure used for searching the ontology to alleviate differences in terminology used in the various knowledge descriptions. In this paper, we explain the format of the knowledge description, the structure of the ontology, and the similarity measure, introduce our prototype system, and show some experimental results.