A New Approach to the Use of Semantic Technologies in E-Learning Platforms

Semantic technologies have been studied and used in different areas of computer science. E-learning has been one of this, but the most frequent use of semantic technologies in this discipline has been in the extraction and indexing of contents, like forums, blogs, learning objects etc. The research presented in this paper aims at taking advantage of semantic technologies in a different way respect to the mainstream use that has been done in the past. This new approach refers to the use of semantic technologies in the management of the persistence layer of Learning Management Systems (LMS), i.e., where all the contents are stored. Our research follows the idea of using semantics technologies as a support, if not an entire replacement, of the backend and persistence mechanisms of LMSs. As a testbed, we will present the design and early results of the application of this approach to the persistence layer of a Virtual Communities System, where these technologies will enriched the platform to address two fundamental issues: a) entities disambiguation and identification inside the persisted objects b) adding new features to the platform without refactoring it.