Abstract—One of the objectives of the Language Technology for Life Long Learning project is to develop services that facilitate learners and tutors in accessing formal and informal knowledge sources. We show that ontologies enriched with social tags play a crucial role in achieving this goal. Ontologies are central to the knowledge discovery process and they facilitate reuse of course material through semantic search of annotated learning objects, supporting thus formal and informal learning.

Index Terms—E-learning, knowledge discovery, ontologies, social media, semantic annotation.

P. Monachesi is with the Utrech t University, the Netherlands and University of Malta, Malta (e -mail: p.monachesi@uu.nl).
T. Markus is with the UiL-OTS, Utrecht University, the Netherlands (e-mail: thomas.markus@phil.uu.nl).
E. Westerhout is with the with the UiL-OTS, Utrecht University, the Netherlands (e-mail: e.n.westerhout@uu.nl).
P. Osenova is with Sofia University and IICT-BAS, Bulgaria (e-mail: petya@bultreebank.org).
K. Simov is with IICT-BAS, Bulgaria (e-mail: kivs@bultreebank.org).

Cite: Paola Monachesi, Thomas Markus, Eline Westerhout, Petya Osenova, and Kiril Simov , "Supporting Formal and Informal Learning through Domain Ontologies ," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 117-121, 2012.