World Wide Web in the Service of Schooling: Semantic Web as a Solution for Language Teaching in Cypriot Secondary Education

This paper examines some suitability aspects of existing web search engines in relation to the content and the stated learning objectives of language teaching in Cypriot secondary education, focusing on the language course of the third high school grade (G9). The end goal is to put the internet in the service of schooling; specifically to categorize the results returned by the search engine into genres in order to facilitate user (teacher or student) in choosing the most appropriate texts for their learning purposes. The tools for categorizing texts are being sought in the field of Semantic Web technology, such as metadata, ontologies, software agents, and, the techniques in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), Information Extraction (IE) and Text Mining. The paper proposes the categorization of texts into six major genre categories according to their external (structural) and internal (linguistic, stylistic) characteristics. For the purpose of this research, the MeDa13 metadata model was designed on the basis of the standard metadata model Dublin Core, and the Textual Genres Ontology (TeGO) was developed for describing the concepts mentioned in genres. In this work, we present the theoretical background for the development of the proposed models (MeDa13 and TeGO), and also the methodological plan to achieve the research objective, which is the categorization of texts into genres considering the content and learning objectives for language teaching.