The educational uses of mathematical ontology and the searching tool

摘要

In Japan, a huge number of entrance examination questions and school textbook exercises are accumulated in databases at various educational institutions and companies in education industry. These databases are now becoming more and more indispensable educational resources for teachers, educational researchers, and learners. However, since these resources are stored in a wide variety of forms, we can not search useful data at the semantic level. To tackle the problem, we constructed mathematical ontology and developed the problem searching tool based on this ontology in our previous work. We use standard ontology technologies which were developed for shared use and reuse of knowledge. The ontology captures one or more experts’ conceptual representation of a domain expressed in terms of concepts and the relationships among the concepts. We analyzed that the features of this technology could be the answer to solve above mentioned problem. In this paper, we describe an overview of the mathematical ontology and the searching tool, focusing on newly added functions, and demonstrate effective utilization of this tool in the field of mathematics education.