Finding Suitable Course Material through a Semantic Search Agent for Learning Management Systems of Distance Education

Developing technology and increasing usage of computers around the world make Internet a convenient tool for Distance Education (DE) systems. Learning Management Systems-(LMSs) of DE around the world serve content-based courses to students/users via static pages on the Web. Additionally, querying for specific course content of an entire course in LMS is only possible by syntactic-based search agents which limit the search. Therefore, it is thought that querying of contents through semantic-based approaches would make LMSs more helpful for a student/user through the Semantic Web (SW) approach. Queries can be meaning based and this can enable the system to make meaningful inference in human-computer interaction. In this article, we propose a system architecture that performs semantic -- based searches through an agent in order to plan student-based schedule of course documents automatically according to student's performance in the course of a semester. OWL language of the SW technology is used during the development of the ontology of the LMS system that is used as a knowledgebase and queried to obtain required data. In this article, we concentrate on developing the system as a module for a LMS currently in use.