An ontology-based system to represent and support students' navigation of philosophical resources
This event took place on Wednesday 22 November 2006 at 11:30

Michele Pasin KMi, The Open University

Philosophy is one of the fields of study where abstract entities (such as "self", "mind" or "good") constitute the core of what is treated. Although some work exists that tries to model mental content (e.g. "ideas") using formal semantics, modeling abstract notions is a particularly difficult task. In this talk, we describe our approach to modelling some basic abstract entities in philosophy within an e-learning scenario. Here we have taken the perspective of a teacher trying to organize his/her learning material about philosophy, with respect to its content, in order to facilitate students' understanding of the subject. Given this context, we introduce an ontology based system to support the annotation of philosophical material, and the navigation of the same, according to content-relevant narrative pathways. We show how such formalization can be related to other existing ontologies, and how different levels of abstraction can be used to provide crossways and to construct curricula, which extend normal textbooks capabilities.