Towards Semantic E-Learning Environment for Biological and Environmental Science ? a Review
(2007)Abstract
Biological and environmental science has remained a discipline in which e-Learning is not fully utilized. Traditionally the Learning Objects of biological and environmental science are Web pages, unstructured documents, numerical data files and numerical data in databases, numerical data being an important part of teaching and learning. This paper reviews research on metadata, ontologies and markup languages for ecological and environmental e-Learning. Two mostly commonly used metadata specifications for e-Learning; Learning Object Metadata (LOM) and Dublin Core (DC) are described as well as two potential markup languages for biological and environmental data, EML and GML. The paper contributes by illustrating the relationships and concepts for semantic e-Learning environments and by discussing the applicability of the specifications and markup languages to biological and environmental science e-Learning.