Constructing knowledge bases for e-learning using Protege 2000 and Web services

This paper presents an approach to designing and developing knowledge bases in e-learning systems. We explore the use of Protege 2000 as a knowledge editor for course material, with the addition of Web service interfaces on top of it to facilitate retrieval of the content. Protege 2000 provides an extensible infrastructure and allows the easy construction of domain ontologies, customized data entry forms, and provides an API that can easily be extended by Web services for the purpose of dynamic course material creation. The use of ontology and Web services makes the knowledge bases for e-learning sharable, reusable, and interoperable with other technologies, such as .Net, which have standard Web service implementations.