Semantic authoring of learning paths with Topic Maps

The rapid development of the World Wide Web in the last few years has brought great opportunities in the way educational materials can be made available to learners. The number of resources available on the Internet is vastly growing, but, on the other hand, some problems emerged as a result of this proliferation of contents, such as the increasingly difficult management and accessibility of these materials. Topic Maps are an ISO standard whose aim is describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. Topic Maps are here proposed as a knowledge representation model to describe the semantic relationships among educational resources. Instructional designers and authors could use this model to facilitate the design of learning paths and their delivery in different contexts. In this paper, after a description of Topic Maps standard, a working hypothesis is discussed about its application in the context of learning design and also a short survey of related works is presented. © 2008 by Knowledge Systems Institute Graduate School. All rights reserved.