Toward an ontology-based approach of context-aware

With the rapid progress of mobile computing technology and network connections, mobile learning has gained significant potential in the field of e-learning and the new teaching approaches [1],Learners are in the center of the learning process and they are provided with adaptive learning experience related to their personal characteristics and educational objectives.In general, adaptation can be done based on the learner profile, learning content, in this paper, we explore anadaptation approach that can be done on the learning environment.In order to provide adapted services for the learner, applications and services should be aware of their contexts and automatically adapt to their changing context-known as context awareness.Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity.An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a learner and an application, including location, time, activities, and the preferences of each entity [2].Context awareness is increasingly taking applicability in pervasive mobile computing, this paradigm refers to the idea that the context-aware mobile learning system should be able to capture, analyze and manage every state of the learner, his external environment and adapt its reactions to the current situation needs [3].Using ontology to model the context-aware in the mobile learning environment has already been proposed in many approaches, but most only offer a weak support for adaptation services, knowledge sharing, context reasoning, and context information presenting.Ontology modeling has proved an effective way to deal with context awareness in the ubiquitous learning environment for the following reasons [4]. 1. Ontologies are a powerful tool to deal with knowledge sharing and information reuse.2. Ontologies enable context-reasoning and interoperability in a pervasive computing system.3. Ontologies play a major role in semantic description modeling of information.The ontology represents a description of concepts and their relationship; these models are very promising for modeling contextual information due to their high and formal expressiveness and possibilities for applying ontology reasoning technics [5].Ontologies in education can be used in the various field, they include domain modeling [6], context modeling and reasoning [7], learning object creation[8] and semantic contextaware reasoning [9].In this study, we propose an ontology-based approach for modeling learner contextual information in order to provide learners with appropriate content related to their context of learning.This paper is structured as follows: In section II we explore the notion of context awareness and his relation with adaptability; in section III we introduce our context-aware modeling based on ontology and semantic web and we conclude in the last section. RELATED WORKThe most relevant approaches presented in the literature for modeling a context-aware are [10],[11],[12]: Key value modelsIn this model context information is presented as a key-value link process, the key presents the information identity and value present the current value of this information (e.g.Set location=room_1).The advantage of this model is the facility of implementation however it presents an inconvenient of information expressiveness for more sophisticated structuring purpose. Graphic modelThis model uses a unified modeling language (UML) to model the context.In particular this model is useful for structuring context information, but usually not used on the instance level.