Um modelo semântico para engenharia de aplicação de linhas de produto de software para sistemas tutores inteligentes

Abstract

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are softwares that aims to represent human behavior inherent in the teaching process in any particular field in order to support the activities of teachers and offer a adapted teaching to students. ITSs have great potential both in the classroom teaching as the distance, however, its construction is a complex and expensive task that requires the presence of specialized professionals in computing and system domain being compounded when you need to build ITSs large-scale and adapted to each area. In this sense, the approach Software Product Lines (SPL) allows to build large-scale ITS. Complementarily, ontologies can be used to allow such a construction is automatically adaptable to different domains. However, in the application engineering phase of the SPL, when ITS are instantiated, is required manipulation of ontologies and different software artifacts, demanding the presence of professionals with expertise in ontology and software engineering, making it difficult the accomplishment of this task by authors / designers. Given the above, we propose an ontology-based model to automate the SPL application engineering for intelligent tutoring systems. Specifically, it is intended to automate the processes of customization, instantiation and deployment of an ITS of a SPL, making the manipulation of ontologies and software artifacts transparent to the user. The proposed model uses ontologies to represent the features and constraints of a generic SPL, the specific features for ITSs, the decisions of the author in terms of which features will be part of the ITS to be generated and the information of the student. The SPL application engineering process is performed by components that lead author by the steps of authentication in the system, selection of the SPL to be instantiated, customization/configuration of the features of ITS, validation, generation and deployment of ITS on a Web server. In order to validate the proposed model has been built a tool that automates the generation of products in a SPL. This tool was used on a case study involving the application engineering of an ITS from a SPL. The obtained results showed to be adequate singled out as major contributions, the design and development of a semantic model for the SPL application engineering for ITSs, this model guides the author through the process making transparent the use of ontologies and SPL, helps reduce complexity and effort (i.e., workload) in the construction of ITSs from semantic SPL, reduces the skills required to instantiate ITSs what can enable more people to perform this task and allows properly validate the configuration of the features of the ITS to be instantiated, allowing only products without misconfigurations can be generated.