Sharing Digital Resources in Teacher Education: an Ontology-based Approach

Abstract

Teacher Education (TE) is a dynamic, lifelong process that needs to fully embrace innovation and assume a broader European perspective. The ECfunded Share.TEC project aims to provide enhanced, culturally-aware access to TE-related resources across Europe by means of a federated resource brokerage system whose semantic core is the proposed Teacher Education Ontology (TEO). This paper describes the rationale for an ontology-driven approach, gives an overview of TEO’s multi-layered structure for addressing multicultural and multilinguistic issues, and presents some aspects of the TEO implementation that allow for language-independent conceptualization and multidimensional hierarchal searching and filtering Other TEO features are also discussed, including the support for dynamically generated user interface and system stability against ontology modifications.