Personalized information retreival in a semantic-based learning environment

Active learning is the ability of learners to carry out learning activities in such a way that they will be able effectively and efficiently to construct knowledge from information sources. Personalized and customizable access on digital materials collected from the Web according to one’s own personal requirements and interests is an example of active learning. Moreover, it is also necessary to provide techniques to locate suitable materials. In this chapter, the authors introduce a personalized learning environment providing intelligent support to achieve the expectations of active learning. The system exploits collaborative and semantic approaches to extract concepts from documents and maintain user and resource profiles based on domain ontologies. In such a way, the retrieval phase takes advantage of the common knowledge base used to extract useful knowledge and produce personalized views of the learning system.