Ontology Based Approach for Finding the Similarity Among Questions in a Distributed Question Bank Scenario

The advance of semantic web and e-learning technologies has provided more opportunities to achieve the goal of collaborative knowledge sharing. It has also facilitated teachers to share their teaching material, tools, and experiences with others through the medium of internet and web technologies. In an earlier paper, we proposed the need for creating a Distributed Question Bank (DQB) by different experts in the related fields. We explored the possibility of using the semantic web technology and ontology in particular in addressing the issue of question similarity in a DQB. In this paper we extend it further, and propose a method of creation of subset ontologies for the questions, and comparing them to find the overlapping concepts to determine question similarity. We also tried formulating a model based on information theoretic approach using this notion of subset ontology, to measure the similarities among the questions in the data set considered.