Use of ontologies to annotate and retrieve educational contents: the AquaRing approach

The paper introduces the use of Semantic Web services within AquaRing, an EC-funded project concerning aquatic environments and their resources, and an ontology used to support educational contents annotation and retrieval. The aim of the project is to improve access to the vast amount of digital content concerning the aquatic environment and its resources, as well as to support enhanced education and informal learning in this specific domain. In order to achieve these goals a semantic web based infrastructure has been designed, implemented and tested and an educational ontology has been developed. In this paper, we start from a short description of the AquaRing project and then describe the educational ontology and its use to annotate and retrieve learning contents within the AquaRing architecture.