Proceedings

Figure 6. General framework of ontology integration for e-learning in financial
and accounting field
The two classes, inherited from the concept E_MemFC, are sub-classes of the
E_MemFC class. The relationships between the concepts can be created anytime in
each of the two ontologies.
3.3. Associating the ontology of field with LOM meta-data
To address the problems related to the lack of semantics in terms of representing and
accessing the pedagogical objects (OP), one can associate the ontologies to certain
elements of LOM (Phaedra & Permanand, 2006, Ouafia et al., 2009). There are two
ways to achieve this association:
• Substituting of one or more LOM elements by concepts found in ontologies;
• Building up a field ontology based on the description schema of LOM.
In fact, the second solution resolves much better the problem concerning the inclusion
of semantics in the OP representation, referring rather to “Who contains?” instead of
“What contains?”.
3.4. Languages for defining of ontologies
A language for defining ontologies must provide the epistemological fundamentals
necessary to describe the ontology’s concepts (classes), their properties and
relationships (attributes and roles), and the constraints on these properties. Currently,
there are various languages for defining and manipulating ontologies. Many of them
are semantic web-orientated: XML to manage the markers used for structuring
documents, RDF (Resource Description Framework) to manage the meta-data of
XML documents, DAML+OIL to represent the meta-data and ontologies, OWL
(Ontology Web Language – standard of World Wide Web Consortium) to formalize
the ontologies.
Among all, the most representative language is OWL, which is a revised version of
the DAML+OIL language. OWL represents a dialect of XML (eXtensible Markup
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