Semantic Networks to Support Learning

Abstract

This article illustrates Conceptual Graph networks representing the content of courses to help students understand, relate, compare, memorize and retrieve many of their concepts. It shows that the ontology of WebKB-2 and its FL notation could be exploited by lecturers to create normalized representations in a scalable way and relatively quick way. They also permit the students to complement these representations, thus providing lecturers with ways to test the students' understanding and analytical skills. Very strong mechanisms supporting semantic checking, cooperation support and normalization need to be implemented for the approach to be successful. Current semantic wikis and knowledge servers (WebKB-2 included) are far from fulfilling such constraints.