OntoQue: A Question Generation Engine for Educational Assesment Based on Domain Ontologies

Assessment forms a key constituent of the instructional process. It provides a measure for evaluating learning and evaluating the effectiveness of instructional pedagogy. However, constructing assessment items for objective tests is a challenging task, which is time consuming and requires experience. This paper describes the Onto Que system, an engine for objective assessment item generation based on domain ontologies. Ontologies are knowledge representation structures which provide a conceptual model of the domain. The engine uses knowledge inherent in the ontology about domain entities such as classes, properties, and individuals to generate semantically correct assessment items. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of the Onto Que engine. The system was evaluated using four OWL ontologies from different domains. Results of the evaluation show that %90 of assessment items generated by Onto Que are categorized as "good".