Specifying Patterns of Educational Settings by means of Ontologies

Beyond the kind of processes dealt with the IMS LD specification, there are other kinds of processes, which are repeated periodically in learning environments that have not already been described yet due to the lack of mechanisms to describe them effectively. Inspired by the standard specification of language processes in the business area and taking into account the patterns philosophy used in the software engineering field, we propose an open framework to formally describe generic processes that usually occurs in the learning environments as patterns of educational settings. The main contribution of this paper is an extensible ontology-based framework to specify processes in learning environments. This framework has been created with the aim of improving the reusability of its formal specifications independently of the educational institutions where the processes occur and the learning platforms that support such processes. As a result of this work we have created a graphical notation for specifying such kind of processes easily and a CASE tool to facilitate its representation and the population of the ontological framework. In a future this framework could be extended to take more advantages: adapting the specifications of patterns to different educational institutions, using an implementation profile to achieve implementation descriptions or other standards to provide other output formats.