Nine month progress report submitted for continuation towards a PhD
Toward a Canonical Method to Solve Patterns of Ontology Modelling Issues 18 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________LTSC group and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to produce a recommended representation of the LOM elements in the Dublin Core metadata element set6. Despite having an RDF binding of the LOM standard available that seemed applicable for the ReSIST Course ontology there were still important obstacles to overcome in order to reuse this resource. A semantic mapping between the fields presented in the template document for a ReSIST course and the LOM standard was required. Conducting this mapping implied a thorough understanding of the LOM element set and its intended use. This proved a very timeconsuming task provided that the LOM standard contains more that 70 metadata elements while the template document to be modelled by our ontology included in the order of 20 fields. Many of the template fields needed had suitable matches in the LOM model but some others did not seem to have an apparent equivalent element or there were a significant semantic distant with respect to potential candidates. Some of such fields from our requirements template included: - Number of credits for the course based on the current EU Credit Transfer (ECTS) system guidelines. - Student interaction type (group or individual homework, projects, lectures, etc.) - Assessment methods (written examination, laboratory work, attendance, etc.) - Course pre-requisites in terms of previous knowledge required from a student to successfully follow the course. - Objectives of the course in terms of learning outcome. Therefore, reusing the LOM standard for ReSIST would involve, firstly specializing or refining from the more than seventy metadata elements to the subset applicable to ReSIST, and secondly, extending the model again to include those fields in the ReSIST course template that did not present LOM equivalents. Based on this analysis, it was estimated that the amount of effort needed to re-engineer the LOM RDF binding to be reused for our purpose, would be greater than developing a custom ontology from scratch to model the approximately twenty fields from our ReSIST course template document. Considering that the amount of time available to produce our ontology deliverable was also fairly limited, it was concluded to create a custom ontology from the ground up that could use the LOM standard as a point of reference.6http://www.77cn.com.cn/educationwiki/DCMIIEEELTSCTaskforce/