An Ontology-Based Method for Integrating Heterogeneous Itembanks

In this paper, we present a simple but efficient algorithm for integrating a collection of heterogeneous itembanks, called heterogeneous itembanks integrator (HIBI). This algorithm is motivated by the desire to integrate itembanks provided by publishers to the users of an e-learning system, which generally use different content structures. The proposed algorithm starts off with one of the itembanks as a reference itembank. All the items on the other itembanks are integrated into the reference itembank to create the so-called meta-itembank. Moreover, by treating the metaitembank thus created as the reference itembank, it can be easily extended by using exactly the same algorithm. We also use the concept of ontology to share itemsets with other systems. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm can provide an extremely high quality result in terms of both the relevance of items and the computation time in Chinese itemsets.