Educational Activity Finder for Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorder through a Semantic Search System

Children with pervasive developmental disorders have special needs so they should be supported with special education programs. These programs are planned according to the type and degree of the disorder, age, characteristics, and needs of the children. Families prefer Internet to search resources about related educational methods (and associated activity/game) and materials. However, syntactic search in today´s Internet is insufficient because of its static base and the search results are not sufficient enough to offer desired relevant results corresponding to a child´s needs. With the help of Semantic Web-based agents an intelligent system able to identify the suitable educational methods and material, will contribute to the development of children with disorders, and support education specialists in this process. In addition it will be extremely useful for the families of these children in need of assisting and monitoring their child´s development. In this article, an Educational Activity Finder (EAF) is being proposed. The architecture of EAF is structured after semantic Web technology so that it can find and propose semantically relevant suitable educational methods (i.e., activities to carry out) and material for use by children with disorders. The knowledge base of EAF keeps educational methods using the OWL language. All related concepts, attributes, and relations between these concepts and features about pervasive developmental disorders are defined through ontology. EAF is structured to recognize a pervasive developmental disorder, sort out symptoms and anomalies, suggest activities, compile performance scores, and decide on new activity based on user preferences by utilizing the semantic descriptions of available methods and activities. Strength of EAF is demonstrated through sample scenarios. EAF may be used by parents, pre-school educators, primary schools, special educational institutions and experts working for these institutions, university students studying in related fields, and individuals interested in pervasive developmental disorders.