Towards Legal Ontology for Education

Abstract

Semantic Web using ontology-based knowledge model has been largely applied to e-Learning systems. The use of domain ontologies leverages the transformation of the learning contents of serving human to machine understandable formats. The ontology-based approach could further support e-Learning activities related to legal compliances, such as legally validate learners’ profiles or protecting intellectual rights in e-Learning courses. This study proposes a novel ontological e-Learning framework including the legal knowledge model, the e-Learning knowledge model and the common knowledge model. A customized ontology engineering method is conducted to construct the preliminary version of these specified knowledge models, while a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rule base is constructed to capture knowledge of both laws and domain experts. FOCA based validation is introduced to confirm the feasibility of this proposed framework. Improving the FOCA score of the legal core ontology and enriching both the ontological knowledge model and its SWRL rule base are topics that can be explored in future studies.