The Use of Ontologies for Syllabus Representation

A syllabus is an important document for teachers, students, and institutions. It represents what and how a course will be conducted. Some authors have researched regarding the components for writing a good syllabus. However, there is not a standard format universally accepted by all educators. Even inside the same university, there are syllabuses written in different type of files like PDF, DOC, HTML, for instance. These kind of files are easily readable by humans but it is not the same by machines. On the other hand, ontologies are technologies of knowledge representation that allow setting information understandable for both humans and machines. In this paper, we present a literature review regarding the use of ontologies for syllabus representation. The objective of this paper is to know the use of ontologies to represent a syllabus semantically and to determine their score according to the five-stars of Linked Data vocabulary use scale. Our results show that some researchers have used ontologies for many purposes, widely concerning with learning objectives. Nevertheless, the ontologies created by the authors do not fulfill with the five-stars rating and do not have all components of a well-suited syllabus.