Protus 2.0: Ontology-based semantic recommendation in programming tutoring system

With the development of the Semantic web the use of ontologies as a formalism to describe knowledge and information in a way that can be shared on the web is becoming common. The explicit conceptualization of system components in a form of ontology facilitates knowledge sharing, knowledge reuse, communication and collaboration and construction of knowledge rich and intensive systems. Semantic web provides huge potential and opportunities for developing the next generation of e-learning systems. In previous work, we presented tutoring system named Protus (PRogramming TUtoring System) that is used for learning the essence of Java programming language. It uses principles of learning style identification and content recommendation for course personalization. This paper presents new approach to perform effective personalization highly based on Semantic web technologies performed in new version of the system, named Protus 2.0. This comprises the use of an ontology and adaptation rules for knowledge representation and inference engines for reasoning. Functionality, structure and implementation of a Protus 2.0 ontology as well as syntax of SWRL rules implemented for on-the-fly personalization will be presented in this paper.