A fuzzy ontology approach to represent user profiles in e-learning environments

Ontologies represent a method of sharing and reusing knowledge on the semantic web. A fuzzy ontology is an extension of domain ontologies for solving the problems of uncertainty. This paper shows how a Fuzzy Ontology based approach can represent user profiles in e-learning environments. The ontological representation of the user profile enhances the performance in tasks such as filtering and information retrieval. An algorithm that allows automatically creating the construction of the ontology is also introduced. This approach has been integrated into a management tool for Learning Objects, in which each user profile is built from Learning Objects published by the user himself. The initial experiments confirm that the automatically obtained fuzzy ontology is a good representation of the user´s preferences. The experiment results also indicate that the approach is useful and warrants further research.