Supporting information access in e‐learning by integrating digital libraries and ontology

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the integration of digital library (DL) technologies with ontology‐based knowledge representation in providing semantic rich information access (IA) in e‐learning. DL technologies have powerful and flexible content management and access functionalities, whereas ontology helps teachers and students to link content materials to their learning objectives. This paper demonstrates that the integration provides a powerful and meaningful e‐learning environment. Design/methodology/approach – DiLight is designed as an interactive e‐learning system that integrates DL and ontology technologies. By conducting comparative experiments involving DiLight in students' actual learning process, the authors examined the advantages and limitations of DiLight in e‐learning. Findings – Compared to a widely used e‐learning environment, DiLight can provide significantly better support for students' complex IA tasks because DiLight is more useful for relationship discovery and problem solving. DiLight is also effective even when students were either less familiar with tasks or felt that they were more difficult. There is no single best access method for all learning situations. Therefore, multiple IA methods should be built into e‐learning systems. Although most of time the search was the first choice of the students, ontology‐based methods were useful in supporting them to complete their tasks too. Originality/value – This is a comparative empirical study using an interactive e‐learning system called DiLight to explore the usage of integrated DL and ontology in e‐learning. The experiment results demonstrate the value of the multiple IA methods provided by DL, and the usefulness of integrating DL with ontology.