Automatic extraction of ontologies from teaching document metadata

SITS (Scrutable Intelligent Teaching System) is designed to make use of existing learning items in flexible and effective learning interactions. The reuse of pre-existing resources is important since creating new learning resources is a time consuming task which requires a skilled author. The Internet also provides a large number of resources for reuse. A major hurdle for reuse is metadata, especially epistemological metadata since different teachers or courses may have different ontologies for a given domain. SITS takes a minimalist approach to metadata. It requires only that the author of a teaching environment should define document metadata specifying the concepts which each document teaches, requires, and uses.