Towards E-Learning Management System using Semantic Web and a unique University namespace "univ"

5 
 
 
Abstract 
 
Today‟s World Wide Web (WWW) is known as Web 2.0. It includes social networking sites, blogs, wikis, 
video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies. It also includes E-learning 
Management system. It is a process in which we use the electronic medium to access the defined set of 
applications, cand processes. Research works in the field of E-Learning are represented by a broad spectrum 
of applications, ranged from virtual classrooms to remote courses or distance learning. Web-based courses 
offer obvious advantages for learners by making access to educational resource very fast, just-in-time and 
relevance, at any time or place. Because of a lot of limitations using web 2.0 for creating E-learning 
management system, now-a-days we use Web 3.0 which is known as Semantic web. It is a great platform to 
represent E-learning management system that recovers the limitations of Web 2.0. It represents a potential 
technology for realizing e-Learning requirements Research works in the field of e-Learning are represented 
by a wide range of applications, ranged from virtual classrooms to remote courses or distance learning. Our 
thesis is “Towards E-Learning Management System using Semantic Web and a unique University 
namespace “univ””, where course syllabus, teaching methods, learning activities and learning styles are 
included and it will be more suitable in different learning institutions in Bangladesh. This paper presents the 
basic information about Learning Management System, E-learning, Semantic Web and the proposed model 
of Learning Management system using semantic web and a vocabulary to represent an university on 
semantic web . We hope that it will provide a great feedback from both teachers and students. 
 
  
Keywords: Learning Management System, E-Learning System, Semantic web, Ontology.
11 
 
 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
This thesis is on “Towards E-Learning Management System using Semantic Web and a unique University 
namespace “univ””. Here this introduction contains an overview of our thesis and background information 
about the Semantic Web and E-learning using Semantic web. It also shortly discusses some intended 
Semantic Web applications and about creating a namespace of universities that identify any universities that 
could be used to build for E-learning Content Management System using Semantic web. 
 
1.1 Background 
E-learning is not just concerned with providing easy access to learning resources, anytime, 
anywhere, via a repository of learning resources, but is also concerned with supporting such features as the 
personal definition of learning goals, and the synchronous and asynchronous communication, and 
collaboration, between learners and between learners and instructors. One of the hottest topics in recent years 
in the AI community, as well as in the Internet community, is the “Semantic Web”. It is an evolving 
extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, 
making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web 
content." It is about making the Web more understandable by machines. It is also about building an 
appropriate infrastructure for intelligent agents to run around the Web performing complex actions for their 
users. Furthermore, Semantic Web is about explicitly declaring the knowledge embedded in many web-based 
applications, integrating information in an intelligent way, providing semantic-based access to the Internet, 
and extracting information from texts .Ultimately, Semantic Web is about how to implement reliable, large-
scale interoperation of Web services, to make such services computer interpretable, i.e., to create a Web of 
machine-understandable and interoperable services that intelligent agents can discover, execute, and 
compose automatically . Unfortunately, the Web was built for human consumption, not for machine 
consumption, although everything on the Web is machine-readable, it is not machine-understandable. We 
need the Semantic Web to express information in a precise, machine interpretable form, ready for software 
agents to process, share, and reuse it, as well as to understand what the terms describing the data mean. That 
would enable web-based applications to interoperate both on the syntactic and semantic level. Note that it is 
Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML) himself that pushes the idea of the 
Semantic Web forward. The father of the Web first envisioned a Semantic Web that provides automated 
information access based on machine-processable semantics of data and heuristics that use these metadata 
.The explicit representation of the semantics of data, accompanied with domain theories (ontologies), will 
enable a Web that provides a qualitatively new level of service, such as: intelligent search engines, 
information brokers, and information filters. Researchers from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 
Chapter 1
12 
 
already developed new technologies for web friendly data description. Moreover, AI researchers have 
already developed some useful applications and tools for the Semantic Web. We will introduce the 
implementation of Semantic Web concept on the e-Learning environment offered by our web-based e-
learning. The facilities that the application will provide include allowing e-learning content to be created, 
annotated, shared and discussed, together with supplying resources such as lecture notes, course description, 
documents, announcements, student papers, useful URL links, exercises and quizzes for evaluation of the 
student knowledge. [16] 
1.2 Outline 
This thesis is mainly divided in two parts:  
 a theoretical and  
 a practical part.  
The practical part answers - and gives solutions to - the thesis goals whereas the theoretical part describes the 
theoretical foundation for our choices.  The structure of the thesis is as follows: 
 
Theoritical part 
 
 1.2.1 Chapter 2 
This chapter includes the main goals and definition of our thesis. Here we include various research questions 
that we are faced during research and a research plan model of our thesis. 
1.2.2 Chapter 3 
This chapter is committed to an overview of the Learning Management system and E-learning.  
1.2.3 Chapter 4 
This chapter is committed to an overview of the Semantic web. In this chapter we represent the limitations of 
current web (WWW) and benefits using Semantic web technologies. Here we include various elements of 
semantic web, structure of the Semantic web and details descriptions about those elements of semantic web 
part by part. In this chapter we include various applications and challenges of Semantic web technologies. 
1.2.4 Chapter 5 
This chapter includes some related works of various researchers in different countries that help us to propose 
our thesis model and create namespace. 
1.2.5 Chapter 6  
This chapter includes why we use semantic web technologies in E-learning management system and the 
proposed model that we are created by researching. 
1.2.6 Chapter 7 
This chapter includes the basic definitions and information of Domains and Namespaces that we want to 
create into implementation part in our thesis.
13 
 
Implementation part 
 
1.2.6 Chapter 8 
Chapter 8 includes the description of  proposed “univ” namespace ontology and the snapshot of the proposed 
ontology for univ namespace using Protégé(ontology editor) that we create in the implementation part of the 
thesis.  
 
1.2.6 Chapter 9 
This chapter includes the testing of univ namespace using the W3C RDF Validation Service. 
 
1.2.6 Chapter 10 
Chapter 10 includes the Result and Discussion after validating rdf file and the resulted triples. 
 
1.2.6 Chapter 11 
This chapter includes the future works of our thesis. 
 
1.2.6 Chapter 12 
Chapter 12 concludes the thesis with a summary of the main contributions of this thesis. 
 
 
1.3 Summary 
 In this chapter we introduce about our thesis and its overall outline of our thesis paper. All chapters 
that are included in theoretical part introduce the basic of Learning management system, Semantic web, its 
technologies, our proposed model, and the univ namespace. Those chapters that are included in practical part 
include implementation of our thesis. During our research, it became clear that for a semantic search engine 
to create Learning management system, all elements including semantic web and Learning management 
system are needed to know. Those elements help us to implement the univ namespace in our thesis.
14 
 
 
 
Problems Definitions & Goals 
 
Semantic web is going to change the way we use web, design and develop the web technologies today. Many 
technologies have been developed for constructing and developing the semantic web. During the last few 
years semantic web has achieved long milestones and also during this period it brought up new ideas to set 
up a new form of web. In this thesis, First, we try to analyze the Semantic web development in detail, 
limitations of today‟s web and study the reasons that caused to come out the concept of semantic web vision. 
We will discuss the impact of this semantic web development on current research in academic environment. 
Second, main objective of our thesis is to present an E-learning management system using our proposed 
model and vocabulary semantic web technologies for Bangladeshi environment that provide a general 
platform for the Bangladeshi learning institutions. At the end we will test the proposed E-learning 
management system model that we create by researching our thesis.  
2.1 Aims 
Followings objectives are set to achieve the aims.  
 To identify the main reasons that brought up the semantic web development,  
 To identify the problems for individual and a learner to adopt the semantic web  
 To propose a ontology based Learning management system model  
 To create universal namespace that defines a University in Semantic web. 
 
2.2 Objectives 
The goal of our research is to design an e-learning management system that provide as a general pattern for 
Bangladeshi learner. This system consists on ontology for different process in e-learning, such as learning 
activities, learning style, teaching methods, and course syllabus. Following objectives are set to achieve the 
goal.  
 Literature study to explore the topics of Semantic web, Ontology.  
 Identification of the problems related to Semantic web development.  
 Advantages of the Semantic web over our world wide web.  
 Design and conduct the experiment.  
 Analyze the experiment result.  
The purpose of the study is to gather academia requirements for the implementation of e-learning 
management system from different perspectives. Researchers focused on training material, related to search 
results in industry and online courses searching material in academia. However, after implementation, 
researchers will verify its results in academia and industry.  
 
  
Chapter 2