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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010SEQUENCING CONCEPTS FOR SUPPORTING ANE-LEARNING CLASS: AN APPROACH BASED ONONTOLOGIES AND THE STRUCTURE OF SIGNSHerli J. de Menezes 1,2 , Sean W. M. Siqueira 2 and Leila Cristina V. de Andrade 21 Federal University of Rio de Janeiro2 Federal University of the State of Rio de JaneiroABSTRACTLearning objects have been used in e-learning with the objective of allowing reuse content material. However, thisapproach also demands getting the right pieces of content and assembling them together in order to build a semanticallyricher instructional material. In order to guide this combination of the right content, it is necessary to define sequences oftopics to be covered and then the files to be used as learning objects. In this paper we discuss Learning Objectcomposition and sequencing from suggestions taken from Knowledge Domain Modeling. We propose the use of adomain ontology for allowing the suggestion of sequences of topics to be covered, which is also based on some conceptsof Semiotics and Linguistics applied to multimedia narrative structures. Learning environment and the teacher action isrepresented as an enactment where educational resources have a role similar to actors in a play. So, the unfolding of alesson is conceived as a narrative, like storytelling, so that the elements are assembled in a discourse. A representation ofthe Knowledge Domain is coined as ontology represented by means of OWL DL and the relevant concepts are arrangedin a list extracted from the representative graph of the domain. From this list of topics, the user can chose the mostadequate corresponding learning objects to be used in a class or learning scenario. The proposal was validated withdomain specialists and the results are also discussed.KEYWORDSLearning Objects. E-Learning. Learning Objects composition. Ontology. Semiotics.1. INTRODUCTIONThe web nowadays has much information about almost everything. Finding the right information is not ahard task anymore. This great amount of available content could be used in educational scenarios. Althoughit is somewhat easy to find material about lots of subjects, organizing content to a specific audience is not sostraightforward. It is necessary to make the semantic connections about the concepts to be explored and theirlevel of explanation. When dealing with learning content there is a common sense towards the reuseapproach, resulting on the so called Learning Objects (LOs). LOs are a kind of resources defined as "anyentity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training" (IEEE, 2002). This widedefinition has the main purpose of encompassing different sort of resources (Wiley, 2002). In this paper, weare focusing on learning content that is available through the learning management systems or through theweb, so only Digital Learning Objects (DLOs) are addressed. There are several types of DLO such as textfiles, diagrams, drawings, mathematical formulas and expressions, exercises (quizzes, problems andexamples), sound and video files and multimedia files.Rodrigues et al. (2008) stated that creating DLO's is time consuming and expensive, so reusing alreadyexisting DLOs is desirable. In order to make this reuse possible it is necessary to provide mechanisms forfinding and accessing DLOs, and composing them according to the different possibilities of exploringcontent or different learning scenarios.For enabling searching and retrieving DLOs, they are described through metadata elements. There somemetadata standards for describing DLOs, but IEEE LOM (IEEE LTSC, 2002) is the most used. AlthoughLOM has a wide acceptance, some learning environments use other metadata not completely compatible withLOM, making finding DLOs a more difficult task as it is necessary to deal with heterogeneity. Therefore,27