Ontology-Driven Development of Intelligent Educational Systems

Despite the opportunities to improve software development though the use of ontologies, there have been few reports giving guidelines for developing such systems based on real case studies. This paper explores what approach to Ontology-driven Software Development (ODD) would be suited for the development of intelligent educational systems such as Athabasca University's eAdvisor - an intelligent academic advising system. With the goal of exploiting synergies with proven software engineering practices to meet the needs of both those who develop the system and those who govern projects, baseline processes for ODD of eAdvisor have been developed. Initial analysis of the feasibility of these baseline processes from performance and complexity viewpoints took place using qualitative analysis of focused interviews. ODD is especially appropriate for the development of intelligent systems with an ontology-based architecture and can leverage familiar and proven software engineering tools and techniques.