The MATHESIS Ontology: Reusable Authoring Knowledge for Reusable Intelligent Tutors

This paper describes the MATHESIS Ontology, which is part of the MATHESIS project that aims at the development of an intelligent authoring environment for reusable model-tracing math tutors. The purpose of the ontology is to provide a semantic and therefore inspectable and reusable representation of the declarative and procedural authoring knowledge necessary for the development of a model-tracing tutor as well as of the declarative and procedural knowledge of the tutor under development. While the declarative knowledge is represented with the basic OWL components, i.e. classes, individuals and properties, the procedural knowledge is represented via the process model of the OWL-S web service description ontology. By using OWL-S, every authoring or tutoring task is represented as a composite process. Based on such an ontological representation, a suite of authoring tools will be developed at the final stage of the project.