Towards evolutional authoring support systems

The ultimate aim of this research is to specify and implement a general authoring framework for content and knowledge engineering for Intelligent Educational Systems (IES). In this context we attempt to develop an authoring tool supporting this framework that is powerful in its functionality, generic in its support of instructional strategies and user-friendly in its interaction with the author. The framework that we offer is an ontology-based authoring environment, since we see the use of ontologies as effective means to have structured content and knowledge engineering. The key contribution of our research is the meta-level Authoring Task Ontology (ATO) specifying authoring tasks, goals and activities, and knowledge about the process of engineering IES. It enables us to enable the specification of "evolutional" authoring support system, as a meta-authoring tool that defines and controls the configuration and tuning process of an authoring tool for a specific authoring process. The role of ATO is to help the IES authoring system to "evolve" by defining such a meta-tool, which "knows" the system's ontological structure. In our approach it works analogously to an authoring tool when it generates a concrete learning support system. The ATO also provides a shared vocabulary between all system components, and allows for better interoperability in a modularised architecture. In this way we have the benefit to monitor and assess the authoring process, and to prevent and solve inconsistencies and conflicting situations. Through ontological engineering, a computational formalization of the intelligent systems authoring, we also give our scientific contribution to the in-depth understanding of what the authoring process is.