Towards automatic generation of e-assessment using semantic web technologies

Semantic Web technologies have been increasingly used as a tool for generating, organizing and personalizing e-learning content, including eassessment. In this paper we discuss and extend an innovative approach to automated generation of computer-assisted assessment (CAA) from Semantic Web – based domain ontologies. We expand the work previously done in this area in two important directions: first, we add new ontology elements (annotations), to the meta-ontology used for generating questions; second, we add semantic interpretation of the mapping between the ‘domain’ ontology and the target ‘question’ ontology. The semantic interpretation is based on the notion of ‘question templates’ that are founded on the Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, but can be sourced equally well in any other pedagogical premise applicable to question design and content (e.g. Kolb’s learning theory). We show with examples obtained from the prototype implementation how that works in practice. The primary application domain for this work is in automated assessment for e-learning, and in particular, development of intelligent CAA systems and question banks, but the ideas can be further generalized in the context of ontology engineering and evaluation.