WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2.2 The Concept of an OntologyAn ontology allows for the hierarchic description of concepts (Bennett, et al., 2006). This gives insight onhow concepts relate to each other. Essentially, an ontology is a tree whereby any node may have multipleparents or children, and, therefore, subsequently siblings.The concept of ontologies in e-Learning is implemented in the LT4eL project which is defined inMonachesi et al. (2008). This project uses the ontology to search for documents in a Learning ManagementSystem but does not entail the idea of using ontologies together with social networks for friends/resourcesrecommendations.2.3 Recommender SystemsRecommender systems are engines that recommend information to a user. For example, they might provide adaily digest of what resources the friends of a user have tagged, or what new friends they have added. Moreintelligently, they might put to action algorithms that analyse an ontology and/or a social network and comeup with prioritised recommendations. Thus, it makes sense, since usage of social networks is on the rise, thatrecommendation approaches based on them are developed. Such approaches take advantage of the fact thatusers would have already manually tagged resources themselves and selected users to be their friends.(Kardan, et al.)2.4 Notion of a Target UserMost of the recommendation algorithms put forward in the project relate to a target user. A target user is theuser on which the recommendation algorithms act, to which: friends, and resources are proposed..3. AIMS & OBJECTIVESThe ‘e-learning Recommender System’ proposed in this thesis aims at providing means which reduces thetime taken for a learner to find relevant resources from the Web. This will definitely be an asset for thoseusers who wish to further their knowledge on a particular topic.The advent of social networking has made the tasks of finding relevant material easier. This has broughtabout the idea of communities of learners in which the latter can share ideas and knowledge amongstthemselves (Terveen, et al., 2001). Thus, it is important for users to identify the other learners who seem tohave similar interests in order to form their network. The proposed system is able to provide the users with alist of other users, also known as friends, who have similar interests which are more likely to form part of theusers’ social network.4. DESIGNWhat social networks provide for is a basis upon which one can build several approaches through which tooffer user recommendations. This is because, since social networks are inherently attractive to a person, onewillingly invests time adding friends and even tagging resources to show his friends that he likes them.Figure 1, below presents several approaches of dealing with recommendations.A summary of the approaches is given below:i) Recommending resources via ontologyThis approach traverses an ontology, seeing what user has tagged. It commences from the different levelsof concepts’ tags of a target user may fall in, and traverses two levels up and two down. It should be notedthat a node in the ontology may be encountered more than once, in different traversals stemming fromdifferent concepts of the target user.378