Towards the development of genuine intelligent ontology-based e-Learning systems

Intelligence of present e-Learning systems is usually static: these systems may provide learning materials of different complexity and/or in differing sequence to various learners according to their abilities, skills and learning progress, but these systems hardly themselves have the ability to evolve and learn new knowledge during their life-cycle. We consider intelligence, which is characterized by (semi-)autonomous knowledge acquisition, learning and/or reasoning in order to enable the provision of better services to the users, as a system quality attribute. We propose a framework for the extension of an existing e-Learning system with intelligence capabilities. We describe an intelligent component of an e-Learning system that is capable of enriching its local domain ontology with new concepts and relationships obtained by querying a remote knowledge base.