{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,16]],"date-time":"2026-04-16T16:48:01Z","timestamp":1776358081868,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":21,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"12","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,11,29]],"date-time":"2018-11-29T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1543449600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Information"],"abstract":"<jats:p>OpenCourseWare (OCW) systems have been established to provide open educational resources that are accessible by anyone, including learners with special accessibility needs and preferences. We need to find a formal and interoperable way to describe these preferences in order to use them in OCW systems and retrieve relevant educational resources. This formal representation should use standard accessibility definitions of OCW that can be reused by other OCW systems to represent accessibility concepts. In this article, we present an ontology to represent the accessibility needs of learners with respect to the IMS AfA specifications. The ontology definitions together with rule-based queries are used to retrieve relevant educational resources. Related to this, we developed a user interface component that enables users to create accessibility profiles representing their individual needs and preferences based on our ontology. We evaluated the approach with five examples profiles.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/info9120302","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,11,29]],"date-time":"2018-11-29T11:47:53Z","timestamp":1543492073000},"page":"302","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["Ontology-Based Representation for Accessible OpenCourseWare Systems"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"9","author":[{"given":"Mirette","family":"Elias","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute of Computer Science, University of Bonn, 53115 Bonn, Germany"},{"name":"Fraunhofer IAIS, 53757 St. Augustin, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Steffen","family":"Lohmann","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Fraunhofer IAIS, 53757 St. Augustin, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"S\u00f6ren","family":"Auer","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), 30167 Hannover, Germany"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,11,29]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"(2018, November 28). Open Education Consortium: What is Open Courseware?. Available online: http:\/\/www.oeconsortium.org\/faq\/what-is-open-courseware\/."},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Elias, M., Lohmann, S., and Auer, S. (2016, January 21\u201323). Fostering Accessibility for OpenCourseWare with Semantic Technologies\u2014A Literature Review. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (KESW \u201916), Prague, Czech Republic.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-45880-9_19"},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Elias, M., Lohmann, S., and Auer, S. (2017, January 8\u201310). Ontology-Based Representation of Learner Profiles for Accessible OpenCourseWare Systems. Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web (KESW), Szczecin, Poland.","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-69548-8_19"},{"key":"ref_4","unstructured":"Grammati-Eirini, K., and Lopes, R. (2009). Deliverable 4.1\u2014A Set of Formalisms and Taxonomies for Accessibility Assessment Procedures and Their Inherent Meta Models, ACCESSIBLE. Technical Report, ACCESSIBLE (Grant Agreement No. 224145)."},{"key":"ref_5","unstructured":"(2018, November 28). IMS Access For All. Available online: https:\/\/www.imsglobal.org\/activity\/accessibility."},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"(2018, November 28). Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure GPII. Available online: https:\/\/ds.gpii.net\/learn\/accessibility-masterlist."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"World Health Organization (2001). International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), WHO."},{"key":"ref_8","unstructured":"(2018, November 28). IMS Personal Needs& Preferences (PNP) Specification Information Model. Available online: https:\/\/www.imsglobal.org\/accessibility\/afav3p0pd\/AfA3p0_PNPinfoModel_v1p0pd.html."},{"key":"ref_9","unstructured":"(2018, November 28). IMS Digital Resource Description Specification Information Model. Available online: http:\/\/www.imsglobal.org\/accessibility\/afav3p0pd\/AfA3p0_DRDinfoModel_v1p0pd.html."},{"key":"ref_10","unstructured":"Project, A.M. (2018, November 28). Making Accessible Content Discoverable: A Benetech Led Proposal for Accessibility Metadata in Schema.org. Available online: http:\/\/www.a11ymetadata.org\/."},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Halilaj, L., Petersen, N., Grangel-Gonz\u00e1lez, I., Lange, C., Auer, S., Coskun, G., and Lohmann, S. (2016, January 19\u201323). VoCol: An Integrated Environment to Support Version-Controlled Vocabulary Development. 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Available online: http:\/\/www.imsglobal.org\/profiles\/index.html."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"17","DOI":"10.1108\/10650741311288797","article-title":"Ontology\u2013driven disability\u2013aware e\u2013learning personalisation with ONTODAPS","volume":"30","author":"Nganji","year":"2012","journal-title":"Campus Wide Inf. Syst."},{"key":"ref_20","unstructured":"Maria, K.C., Ronell, A., Aurona, G., and Gibson, C. (2008, January 26\u201327). Enhancing Web Portals with Ontology-Based Data Access: The Case Study of South Africa\u2019s Accessibility Portal for People with Disabilities. Proceedings of the OWL: Experiences and Direction (OWLED \u201908), Karlsruhe, Germany."},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Iniesto, F., and Rodrigo, C. (2015, January 7\u20139). Accessible user profile modeling for academic services based on MOOCs. Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Vilanova i la Geltru, Spain.","DOI":"10.1145\/2829875.2829922"}],"container-title":["Information"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2078-2489\/9\/12\/302\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T15:33:22Z","timestamp":1760196802000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/2078-2489\/9\/12\/302"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2018,11,29]]},"references-count":21,"journal-issue":{"issue":"12","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,12]]}},"alternative-id":["info9120302"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/info9120302","relation":{},"ISSN":["2078-2489"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2078-2489","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2018,11,29]]}}}