Collaborative tagging approaches for ontological metadata in adaptive e-learning systems

One of the main approaches for creating metadata for learn- ing resources in adaptive e-learning systems has been through the use of semantic web ontologies. This approach is limiting because it doesn't usu- ally address a requirement for the support of annotators or the require- ment for significant effort by annotators in learning ontological metadata domains and technologies. This paper proposes a method of addressing these shortfalls, by incorporating techniques used on the hugely popular collaborative tagging websites, such as del.icio.us1. By extending on a natural language ontology, we aim to achieve simplicity in metadata au- thoring while maintaining the expressiveness of a lightweight ontology. The goal of the approach is to facilitate metadata creation such that new metadata creators (such as students) may become involved with creating machine consumable metadata about learning objects, for use in adaptive e-learning systems.