COMET: Context Ontology for Mobile Education Technology

The use of mobile devices is increasingly prevalent in education. These devices provide the convenience of supporting access to learning anytime, anywhere. Further, mobile learning provides opportunities to tailor the learning experience to dynamically changing contexts. Major challenges for constructing context-aware models to support this kind of learning include defining the contextual information and adapting to dynamic changes. Ontology-based context models exhibit features such as expressiveness, extensibility, ease of sharing and reuse, and logic reasoning support, and thus show promise in this area. In this paper, we propose COMET (Context Ontology for Mobile Education Technology) in order to provide a semantically rich model for mobile learning. More specifically, we have demonstrated an example application to show how we can retrieve contextual data from different participating entities within the ontology by using their semantic understanding.