Sahayika: A framework for participatory authoring of knowledge structures for education domain

In countries like India, a great deal of diversity exists in language, culture and socio-economic conditions. In order to deliver computer aided education, efforts have to be put for proper management of concerned domain and learning materials keeping in mind this diversity. Participatory authoring of domain knowledge structure is of immense importance in this regard. In this paper, we describe a knowledge structure which is effective in capturing the structure of the learning materials of school level subjects. Ontologies have gained importance in representing the knowledge of the domain in a formal and machine understandable form in areas like intelligent information processing. Thus it can provide the platform for effective extraction of information and many other applications. We describe different aspects of manual ontology engineering in developing application specific domain ontology. The domain of our interest is the education domain where we are interested in retrieving relevant Web documents for the curriculum related requirements of school students. We identify an effective way of structuring the knowledge about these domains, which allows us to clearly demarcate the roles of topics, concepts, and actual words. We also describe applications in the area of information retrieval and in indexing document repositories in connection with e-learning where our ontology plays an important role. In this paper, we have provided a framework, Sahayika, for building knowledge structures in education domain.