Theory-aware authoring environment-ontological engineering approach

In AI in education research community and related academic communities such as learning science (LS), instructional science (IS) and instructional design science (ID), a lot of research results have already accumulated and many sophisticated learning support systems have been built to date. The problem, however, is that it is not easy to build a good learning support system well-justified by such basic theories because they are not easily accessible for system designers/developers nor ready for engineering use. Imagine a theory-aware authoring environment, which can help designers/developers find, understand and utilize necessary LS/IS/ID theories to build a theory-justified learning support system. It must give a great impact on our community. The authors have some experience in building ontologies for learning support systems and LS/IS/ID knowledge as well as a road map towards a theory-aware authoring system. On the basis of development of a general framework of an ITS, we first designed a comprehensive ontology for ITS.