A Learner Oriented Ontology of Metadata to Improve Effectiveness of Learning Management Systems A Learner Oriented Ontology of Metadata to Improve Effectiveness of Learning Management Systems

This paper presents an ontology for an e-Learning Management System (LMS), which arranges metadata, and defines the relationships of metadata, which are about learning objects; belong to academic courses and user profiles. This ontology has been incorporated as a critical part of the proposed architecture. By this ontology, effective retrieval of learning content, customizing LMS is expected. Metadata used in this paper are based on current metadata standards. This ontology specified in human and machine-readable formats. In implementing it, several APIs were defined to manage the ontology. They were introduced into a typical open sourced LMS. Proposed ontology maps user preferences with learning content to satisfy learner requirements. These learning objects are presented to the learner based on ontological relationships. Hence it increases the usability and customizes the LMS.