The Construction of Teaching Resource Library based on Semantic Web
Abstract— nowadays, with rapid popularization and development of the Internet,
Semantic web plays a more important role in the design of information system. But in
the construction of teaching resource library, there seldom involve in this technology.
So this paper proposes a design and development framework for teaching resource
library system that uses semantic web technology. The use of semantic web can
more effectively support the construction of resource library. It can also support
teachers and students to conveniently share and reuse course knowledge via Internet
or Intranet in e-learning.
摘要：
現今網路迅速的普及與發展，語意網在資訊系統的設計占有非常重要的角色。但
是在建設教學資源庫部分，就很少使用這類技術。所以這片論文提出一個設計與
開發框架的建議，使用語意網技術在教學資料庫系統。使用語意網能更有效的支
持建設資源庫。這也可以支援教師與學生去
This paper performs the following tasks: (1) introduction semantic web, ontology
technology and teaching resources; (2) demonstration an example of resource
ontology; (3) discussion representation method of resource ontology; (4)
presentation of a framework for teaching resource library based on ontology and
implementation of a simple prototype system; (5) conclusion and expectation of the
further work.
Keywords-Ontology; Teaching Resource Library; Semantic Web; ontology technology;
I. INTRODUCTION
With development of the Internet, nowadays Web has become the largest,
distributed resource library available from anywhere in the world at any time. This
vast virtual information and resource library have constructed a very good e-learning
environment. But how to make full use of these resources and more convenient
search them for desired information in teaching has become a prominent problem.
Currently, the construction of teaching resource library doesn’t have unified standard,
and resource representation is usually lack of semantic information. Moreover,
search engines exist are all based on keyword searches. So the quality of teaching
resource library is very poor, and search results for a certain resource can not meet
our desired.
隨著網際網路的發展，現今 Web 規模變的非常的大，電子學習的資源庫分布在
世界各地。這個龐大的訊息資料庫，建構了一個良好的電子學習環境。但是如何
充分使用這些資源並且能夠更方便的搜索他們所需的訊息，在教學已經成為一個
非常重要的問題。目前，教學資源庫建設並沒有統一的標準，資源的表示通常缺
乏語意訊息。此外，搜尋引擎通常都是基於關鍵字搜索。因此，教學資源庫的品
質非常的差，這些搜尋結果已經不能滿足我們的理想。
Semantic web and ontology technology provide a method to construct and use
knowledge resource by attaching semantic information to them. So we try to present
a framework integrated ontology technology for the construction of teaching
resource library. Ontology technology has become a popular technology nowadays in
the development of information system [1, 2], such as WebOnto and Ontolingua. It
plays more important role in knowledge construction and share.
Meanwhile, we also believe that the study of teaching resource library based on
ontology will be extremely important, and it promotes the growing body of
knowledge resource in e-learning.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces background
materials on semantic web, ontology and teaching resource. Section 3 demonstrates
an example of Java Data Types ontology. Section 4 discusses resource ontology
representation. Section 5 proposes the framework of teaching resource library based
on ontology technology. The final section summarizes the current work and provides
thoughts for future research.
II. RELATION WORK
A. Semantic web
Nowadays the Semantic Web (SW) is a hot research topic and would be the next
evolutionary step for the Web. It originally proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1998 and
later formally defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in
2001(www.w3.org), The SW aims to attach some semantic information to the current
web resources in order to support machine reading, understanding and automatic
processing. Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision and concept of the
semantic web. In the later he also provided the semantic web architecture for
research and development. The semantic web provides a common framework that
allows data, information and knowledge to be shared and reused across application,
enterprise, organization and community boundaries. The semantic web is realized by
some new technologies such as XML, RDF, and ontology.
Figure 1 shows the whole architecture of semantic web [3, 4]. There are eight layers.
For example, they include URI (Universal Resource Identifier) and UNICODE, RDF
(Resource Description Framework) which is a variety of data interchange formats (e.g.
RDF/XML, N3), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and OWL(Web Ontology
Language) which is a kind of ontology describe language, all of which are intended to
provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given
knowledge domain. The top layer is a user interface and application. In the
architecture there is cryptography which is responsible for digital signature and
information safety.
In following, we give a short description of the main several layers:
 XML provides a surface syntax for structured documents, but imposes no
semantic constraints on the meaning of these documents.

XML Schema is a language for restricting the structure of XML documents and
also extends XML with datatypes.
限制 XML 文件的結構語言

RDF is a datamodel for objects ("resources") and relations between them,
provides a simple semantics for this datamodel, and these datamodels can be
represented in an XML syntax.
物件與物件之間關係的資料模型，提供一個簡單的語意給資料模型，而這些
資料模型也可以是一個 XML 語法。

RDF Schema is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF
resources, with a semantics for generalization-hierarchies of such properties and
classes.
利用詞彙與語義泛化層次結構來描述 RDF 資源的屬性與類別

OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others,
relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"),
equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g.
symmetry), and enumerated classes.
OWL 增加更多慈會去描述屬性與類別：類別之間的關係、基數、相等、多
元型態、屬性的特徵
In additional, there is cryptography which is responsible for digital signature and
information safety in the architecture, because the trust is a very important in the
use of knowledge resource.
B. Ontology Technology
At present ontology technology is a widely adopted new key technology in
knowledge-based system development. It can help us define the concept of
knowledge and provide a uniform shared vocabulary for a certain domain course
with the explicit descriptions and specifications. There are many kinds of definitions
in various application fields about ontology term which has its origin in philosophy.
In computer and information science, ontology is defined as a share explicit
specification of conceptualization and relationship in certain domain knowledge. This
definition was originally proposed by Gruber in 1992 [2]. It consists of a set of
concepts, properties, axioms and relationships between concepts in domain
knowledge. The use of ontology technology can help us knowledge sharing and
communication by uniform vocabulary.
The definition of ontology includes four elements: concepts, relations, axioms and
instances. Object: = <C, Ro, A, I>;




Concepts: the class of all the examples of that event or entity in a certain
domain.
Relations: represent a relationship between concepts.
Axioms: express a necessary fact holding between concepts and relationships.
Instances: represent a specific individual in practice.
Ontology technology provides a framework for shared concepts, properties and
relations of certain domain, which can reuse a lot of knowledge, and reduce or
eliminate confusion of concepts and terms in e-learning system. Nowadays, there
exist some ontology representation languages such as OWL, Ontolingua. Computer
scientists and domain experts have built some large and robust ontology databases
such as WordNet , Cyc, How net and etc.
C. Teaching Resource
Teaching Resources include teacher worksheets, course materials, downloads, games,
rubrics, or any of our other teacher tools.
Teaching Resource Library is the teacher store, offering affordable teacher supplies
and free teachers' resources. It offers free resources to teachers, parents and
students in support of classroom instruction and learning. Teachers and students can
access them from the menu of the teaching resource library. The library is constantly
being updated.
III. AN EXAMPLE OF RESOURSE ONTOLOGY
Obviously, ontology technology can effectively help in designing the structure of
teaching resource (Fischer, 2001). “Java Data Type” ontology demonstrates the
design process of teaching resource library.
顯然的，本體技術可以有效地幫助設計教學資源結構(Fischer, 2001)。
這裡以 JAVA 資料型態的本體來示範教學資源庫的設計過程。
Table 1 shows the types of relations among network protocol.
表一則是顯示網路協定之間的關係型態。
Figure 2 is an example of teaching resource ontology for the course “ Java Program” .
This ontology presents the concept relations for the domain of “Data Types”. Figure 3
shows Primitive Type is a type of data types. Extend Type is another type of data
types. This “isType” shows as solid line. “-128~127” is a property of byte, which
expresses value range of byte. “0” is a default value of byte. So it is a property of byte.
This “HasProperty” shows as dotted line. From figure 3, we can easily understand the
relationship between Primitive Type and Extend Type, and know that Java has eight
primitive types of data: byte, short, int, long, char, float, double, and boolean. These
can be put in four groups: Integers, Characters, Floating and Boolean; and Integers
includes byte, short, int and long the properties of byte. Finally we also know those
properties of byte.
圖二是一個”JAVA 程式”課程的教學資源本體的例子。這個本體論提出了”資料類
型”領域的概念關係。
IV. RESOURSE ONTOLOGY REPRESENTATION
資源本體表示方法
The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to
process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans.
OWL can be used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and
the relationships between those terms. OWL facilitates greater machine
interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema
(RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has
three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.
OWL WEB 本體語言是專為應用程序所設計用來處理的訊息內容，而不是僅提供
訊息給人類使用。OWL 可以用來明確表示在詞彙術語以及這些術語之間的關係
的含意。OWL 有利於機器解讀 Web 內容，可以利用 XML，RDF 和 RDF Schema
的來支援 OWL 的解讀，他們可隨著正式語意來提供額外的詞彙。OWL 提供三種
能力遞增的子語言，分別是 OWL Lite、OWL DL、OWL Full。
http://zh.transwiki.org/cn/owloverview.htm
Let us illustrate the use of OWL vocabulary on an example ontology (inspired by OWL
Pizzas): "Pizza has PizzaBase as its base; Pizza is disjoint with PizzaBase;
NonVegetarianPizza is exactly Pizza that is not VegetarianPizza; isIngredientOf is a
transitive property; isIngredientOf is inverse of hasIngredient".
Pizza 有一個 PizzaBase 做為他的基礎
Pizza 與 PizzaBase 不相關
NonVegetarianPizza(非素食)是 Pizza 但他不是 VegetarianPizza(素 Pizza)
The same example expressed using OWL Abstract Syntax formulates the same
information using LISP-like notation, and in addition uses URI for identification of all
classes and properties:
Namespace(p= <http://example.com/pizzas.owl#>)
Ontology( <http://example.com/pizzas.owl#>
Class(p:Pizza partial
restriction(p:hasBase someValuesFrom(p:PizzaBase)))
DisjointClasses(p:Pizza p:PizzaBase)
Class(p:NonVegetarianPizza complete
intersectionOf(p:PizzacomplementOf(p:VegetarianPizza)))
ObjectProperty(p:isIngredientOf Transitive
inverseOf(p:hasIngredient))
)
http://www.obitko.com/tutorials/ontologies-semantic-web/owl-example-with-rdf-gr
aph.html
http://www.co-ode.org/resources/papers/ekaw2004.pdf
V. SYSTEM FRAMEWORK AND IMPEMENTATION
Figure 3 presents ontology-based teaching resource library system framework with a
provided ontology and knowledge base. Domain experts and ontology designers first
acquire the knowledge from existing traditional database, documents and Internet.
Then domain experts create resource ontology. Meanwhile, the domain experts may
refer to previous knowledge base and ontology library. Users can conveniently access
to teaching resource ontology library from web browser such as IE. The teaching
resource ontology library is a wellorganized teaching resource for sharing in
e-learning.
圖三提出了一個以語意基於本體的教學資源庫系統框架與本體和知識庫。領域專
家與本體設計者，首先從現有的傳統資料庫與文件獲得知識。然後由領域專家建
立資源本體。同時，該領域的專家，可參考以前的知識基礎和本體庫。用戶可以
方便的透過網頁瀏覽器來存取教學資源。教學資源本體庫是在電子學習分享一個
組織良好的教學資源。
We can organize teaching materials with knowledge ontology to support the
description of teaching domain resources used to semantically define concepts,
properties and relations. So the quality of teaching resources is greatly improved.
Meanwhile semantic search is more effective than keyword search. In e-learning we
greatly prompt the exchange and share of teaching resource through this system.
我們可以使用知識本體來組織教學資源，支援教學領域中使用語意去定義概念、
屬性與關係的描述。同時，語意搜尋比關鍵字搜尋夠有效。我們在電子學習推動
此系統做教學資源的交換與共享。
Currently this prototype system to implement the proposed framework is under
development. We prepare to implement the system in Oracle10, JavaEE SDK1.6,
Spring, Hibernate and Jboss (or Tomcat).
目前這個模型系統實作在建議的框架下發展，我們準備實作這個系統在 Oracle 10,
JavaEE SDK1.6, Spring, Hibernate 與 Jboss (或 Tomcat).
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernate
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBoss
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tomcat
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle%E6%95%B0%E6%8D%AE%E5%BA%93
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javaee
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper we introduce semantic web and ontology technology. Then we also
analyze the construction of teaching resource ontology in e-learning environment.
Finally, we discuss a novel framework for the construction of teaching resource
library using ontology technology. Of course, at present we finish the basic research
work. In the future, we plan to implement this prototype system and use it in some
course teaching. In addition, the flexibility of the system ensures us to go on
integrating new technology into the system.
With the rapid growth of Internet, we believe that the teaching resource library will
be widely used in e-learning in the near future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported partially by Zhejiang Educational Foundation of China
(20071002, Y200906971), Project on Educational Sciences Planning of Ningbo
(YGH004) and Ningbo University Research Project (2009770, XYL09006). So the
authors would like to thank the supports and our team members for their ideas.
Moreover, the authors are also grateful to the anonymous referees for helpful
comments and numerous suggestions to improve the paper.