An Educational Development Tool Based on Principles of Formal Ontology

Computer science provides with virtual laboratories, places where one can merge real experiments with the formalism of algorithms and mathematics and where, with the advent of multimedia, sounds and movies can also be added. In this paper we present a method, based on principles of formal ontology, allowing one to develop interactive educational tools. The structure of our system starts from general considerations on knowledge itself moving on to formal ontological principles in order to obtain a robust knowledge frame and good awareness of knowledge levels involved during the teaching process. Our system is split into object-knowledge - the knowledge of the phenomenon to be taught - and meta-knowledge - i.e., how to teach it. Using a trip (journey) metaphor, together with the flexibility of semantic graph representations, we define the reference frame and we apply it to a case study related to the Planetary Missions, the subject of our research. This tool is provided with a multimedia interface to show the results of several current missions , but may be implemented with new missions.