Developing educational ontology: a case study in physics

Nowadays, e-learning systems are widely developed. With e-learning, students can learn different subjects remotely, and teachers can edit online teaching scripts and issue online courseware. But complain is ceaseless, that is either students or teachers are not satisfied with the existing state of affairs. The reason is that they expect that students can master knowledge architecture of required subjects, but current scattered courseware lacks systematicness. How to describe knowledge architectures of subjects, e.g. in K12, and help students to master them? Ontology can be used to efficiently present knowledge architecture of different subjects, such as Physics. A big challenge is how to construct educational ontology to describe systematic knowledge of subjects automatically. In this paper educational ontology is as a new topic discussed. An approach to automatically constructing educational ontology is proposed to convert textbook into a corresponding Ontology, with High School Physics as an example.