The ontological identity of learning objects: an analysis proposal

In the recent years, several semantic-based educational projects have been carried out, focusing on improving content retrieval within digital object repositories. Usually these projects are founded on the use of ontologies and semantic markup to represent the knowledge domain, as well as technical and pedagogical content features. However, from a literature analysis, learning objects (LOs) ontologies appear frequently to be designed more on the basis of the pragmatic convenience of the specific application frame and the developers’ personal intuition than on a rigorous ontological analysis. This approach has as main disadvantage the development of incongruous models which cannot support logical reasoning processes and cannot be easily reused in a different context from that in which they have been designed. Therefore a preliminary analysis on the ontological identity of learning objects is here proposed in order to support the formulation of a well-founded LO definition, which should be provided before any LO ontology engineering process.