Mathematical Ontology and a Software Tool for Semantic Retrieval of Exercise Problems

A huge number of entrance examination questions are accumulated in databases at various educational institutions and companies in education industry. These questions are valuable resources for teaching materials at schools. However, these resources are not accessible at the semantic level, that is, we can not retrieve right data by specifying concepts or teaching goals independent of the ways of presentation and terminology. Though such problems in various fields are successfully tackled by introducing ontology technologies, little is accomplished in the educational domain. In this paper, we introduce an example of ontology in the field of mathematics education and present a problem searching tool based on the ontology to prove the effectiveness of our semantic approach.