Abstract
Recommender systems in e-learning domain play an important role in assisting the learners to find useful and relevant learning materials that meet their learning needs. Personalized intelligent agents and recommender systems have been widely accepted as solutions towards overcoming information retrieval challenges by learners arising from information overload. Use of ontology for knowledge representation in knowledge-based recommender systems for e-learning has become an interesting research area. In knowledge-based recommendation for e-learning resources, ontology is used to represent knowledge about the learner and learning resources. Although a number of review studies have been carried out in the area of recommender systems, there are still gaps and deficiencies in the comprehensive literature review and survey in the specific area of ontology-based recommendation for e-learning. In this paper, we present a review of literature on ontology-based recommenders for e-learning. First, we analyze and classify the journal papers that were published from 2005 to 2014 in the field of ontology-based recommendation for e-learning. Secondly, we categorize the different recommendation techniques used by ontology-based e-learning recommenders. Thirdly, we categorize the knowledge representation technique, ontology type and ontology representation language used by ontology-based recommender systems, as well as types of learning resources recommended by e-learning recommenders. Lastly, we discuss the future trends of this recommendation approach in the context of e-learning. This study shows that use of ontology for knowledge representation in e-learning recommender systems can improve the quality of recommendations. It was also evident that hybridization of knowledge-based recommendation with other recommendation techniques can enhance the effectiveness of e-learning recommenders.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61370137), the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2012CB7207002), the Ministry of Education—China Mobile Research Foundation Project (No. 2015/5-9 and No. 2016/2-7) and the 111 Project of Beijing Institute of Technology. The authors want to acknowledge the useful suggestions of the reviewers which have increased significantly the quality of the review.
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Tarus, J.K., Niu, Z. & Mustafa, G. Knowledge-based recommendation: a review of ontology-based recommender systems for e-learning. Artif Intell Rev 50, 21–48 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-017-9539-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-017-9539-5