Multilingual learning objects indexing and retrieving based on ontologies

Learning, teaching and training processes are increasingly relying on the Web. Different types of educational web applications are indeed available and provide to learners and trainers a considerable number of online educational resources. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning objects indexing and retrieving in online learning environments, and propose to use an ontology-based description model, whose main objective is to improve access, search and reuse of learning resources. The ontological concepts and relations that we propose provide a means of guided navigation within an e-Learning system resources. They also allow performing multilingual search in these resources. An implementation of this model in a multilingual learning portal, where we used the proposed ontologies to perform trilingual search within a database of Arabic, French and English learning resources, is described.