# An Ontology-Driven Learning Assessment Using the Script Concordance Test
## 2 Methods and Materials
### SCTonto  
For the development of SCTonto ontology, we adopted the SABiO 2.0 process [38]. Figure 1 illustrates the methodology we followed and the workflow adopted for the development of the SCTonto. The main purpose of SCTonto ontology is the ability to support semantic annotations of the script concordance test assessment method. In other words, it will serve as a framework for an ontology-based e-assessment platform for automatic SCT question generation. The main groups that benefit from the proposed ontology are course administrators and teachers, who will be able to quickly and conveniently generate appropriate questions. Functional and non-functional requirements were important in the first phase of the development. Functional requirements were stated in the form of competency questions that help developers to determine what is relevant and what is not, thus defining the scope of the ontology [39]. Some of the competency questions regarding SCTonto are \"Can each question have more than one case description?\", \"How many hypotheses can each question have?\", \"Does every new information item describe exactly one hypothesis item?\", \"How many possible effects can one new information have on the hypothesis?\", etc. Aside from functional parameters, the non-functional requirements were defined as well. They state that an ontology-based system should generate SCT type of questions for student assessments, and a SPARQL reasoner should be used. In our case, we wanted to keep the ontology simple, so we constrained the ontology to be implemented in the RDF language. As an application ontology, SCTonto should be complemented with a domain ontology. It could be medical ontology or electronic health record (EHR) ontology since they define foundations for most of the main concepts in SCTonto ontology, such as symptoms and signs (case description in SCT), diagnosis (hypothesis in SCT), laboratory and other analysis (new information in SCT), etc. Due to patient privacy issues, populated EHR ontologies are difficult to obtain in the public domain. Hence, for the purpose of this research, we decided to map the medical records database [40] into SCT ontology instead. The detailed process of the mapping is described in the next section. After ontology type definition, concepts and relations between them were identified as well. A detailed description of conducted analysis and defining of SCTonto concepts and their properties are described in our previous study [27]. Here, we give a brief illustration of the main classes and properties. SctQuestion, sct:CaseDescription, sct:Hypothesis, sct:NewInformation, and sct:Response are the main classes. Since each SCT question consists of one case description, several hypotheses, several new information, and several responses, this was modeled with properties sct:hasCaseDescription, sct:hasHypothesis, scthasNewInformation, and sct:hasResponse. The relationship between the instance of sct:CaseDescription class and the sct:NewInformation class was modeled with property sct:hasRelevant since it emphasized that case description is an ill-defined patient vignette in which some part of the information is missing. The sct:hasPossibleEffect and sct:isPossibleEffectBy are properties that represent the fact that new information may or may not have the effect on the proposed hypothesis and vice versa. Graphical representation of main SCT concepts and relationships, performed in the Graftoo tool [41], is presented in Figure 2. The fact that students grade each hypothesis by selecting an appropriate number on the Likert scale is modeled through two properties: sctisGradedBy and sct: grades. Figure 1: Workflow for the development of the SCTonto ontology. Figure 2: SCTonto ontology. During the design phase, a middle-out approach was applied since it strikes a balance between levels of details [42]. The most important concepts were defined first and then followed by the higher-level concepts, thus creating them to be presumably stable.