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Fuzzy ontologies-based user profiles applied to enhance e-learning activities

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Abstract

Nowadays, the impact of technological developments on improving human activities is becoming more evident. In e-learning, this situation is no different. There are common to use systems that assist the daily activities of students and teachers. Typically, e-learning recommender systems are focused on students; however, teachers can also benefit from these type of tools. A recommender system can propose actions and resources that facilitate teaching activities like structuring learning strategies. In any case, a complete user’s representation is required. This paper shows how a fuzzy ontology can be used to represent user profiles into a recommender engine and enhances the user’s activities into e-learning environments. A fuzzy ontology is an extension of domain ontologies for solving the problems of uncertainty in sharing and reusing knowledge on the Semantic Web. The user profile is built from learning objects published by the user himself into a learning object repository. The initial experiment confirms that the automatically obtained fuzzy ontology is a good representation of the user’s preferences. The experiment results also indicate that the presented approach is useful and warrants further research in recommending and retrieval information.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MEC) under TIN2010-20395 project, the Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha under PEIC09-0196-3018 and POII10-0133-3516 projects, the HECAOT UCLM Project (TC20112330), the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT, Mexico) and by the Council of Science and Technology of Yucatan State (CONCYTEY, Mexico).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technologies and Systems, University of Castilla La Mancha, Paseo de la Universidad, 4, 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Mateus Ferreira-Satler, Francisco P. Romero & Manuel E. Prieto

  2. Autonomous University of Yucatan, Calle 60, 491-A x 57, 97000, Mérida, Mexico

    Victor H. Menendez-Dominguez & Alfredo Zapata

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  1. Mateus Ferreira-Satler
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Correspondence to Mateus Ferreira-Satler.

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Ferreira-Satler, M., Romero, F.P., Menendez-Dominguez, V.H. et al. Fuzzy ontologies-based user profiles applied to enhance e-learning activities. Soft Comput 16, 1129–1141 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-011-0788-y

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