About The Nature And The Identity Of Learning Objects

Web 2.0 applications have made large amounts of educational resources available for public sharing and reuse. However various problems emerge as a result of this proliferation of materials, such as their increasingly difficult management. In this context, semantic technologies seem to offer great opportunities for teachers, learners and instructional designers to retrieve and share learning objects (LO). Ontologies and semantic mark-up represent the core of knowledge network on the semantic web. Actually, although the term "ontology" (deriving from philosophy) has become very common in computer science, it was often adopted without perusing the original meaning and the analytical tools that philosophers offer to support ontologically well-founded analysis. In the recent years, different "semantic educational projects" have been proposed aiming to develop ontology-based LO repositories. These latter represent an interesting framework for supporting learning processes; they are usually based on the development of ontologies aiming at representing the knowledge domain, as well as technical and pedagogical LO features. However, from a literature analysis, LO 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 an ontological analysis. The main disadvantage of this approach is the development of inconsistent models which cannot support logical reasoning processes and cannot be easily reused in a different context from that in which they have been designed. This study takes an approach developed in the "applied ontologies" field, which implies the adoption of an interdisciplinary method aiming at developing well-founded ontologies that can be applied in specific application contexts. More specifically the authors' proposal is based on DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) as theoretical reference framework; it is a foundational ontology, developed at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), describing very general conceptual primitives. Therefore this study offers a preliminary analysis about the nature and the identity of learning objects in order to support the formulation of an ontological LO definition, which should be provided before any LO ontology engineering process.