Título: Ontological Engineering and its Applications (emphasis in Educational
Contexts)

Palestrante:  Seiji Isotani
Department of Knowledge Systems
ISIR, Osaka University, Japan
http://www.ei.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/~isotani

Data:   3/11/2008, 14h30
Local:  Sala 03B, IME-USP

Resumo:

In recent years, with the increasing use of technology, Artificial
Intelligence has been gradually and successfully introduced into
a variety of systems (including educational ones). However, major
challenges still remain. Among these, we are interested in how to
represent the knowledge of intelligent authoring systems and then how
to use this knowledge efficiently. Usual approaches to such issues
provide their systems with a kind of expertise using a set of
heuristics and domain theories built-in the procedures (programming
languages). This means that the programmers, not the systems, have an
understanding about the knowledge being used. To deal with this
problem, we will show some of the efforts the ontology engineering
community has been done in order to create better intelligent systems.
First of all, we will try to create a basic common understanding about
the difference between heavy- and light-weight ontologies. Then, we
will explain the research being done in Japan to define heavy-weight
ontologies that support the development of intelligent systems.
Finally, we will present the development of an ontology for Education
used to support collaborative learning and its results to (a) produce
semantically-enabled intelligent systems; and (b) help instructors to
design effective collaboration in real scenarios.