=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1780/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=A Formalization Of Standard Knowledge And Skills For The French Elementary School Curricula
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1780/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1780
|authors=Oscar Rodríguez Rocha,Catherine Faron Zucker
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ekaw/RochaF16
}}
==A Formalization Of Standard Knowledge And Skills For The French Elementary School Curricula==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1780/paper6.pdf
A Formalization Of Standard Knowledge And
Skills For The French Elementary School
Curricula
Oscar Rodríguez Rocha1 , Catherine Faron Zucker2
1
INRIA Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée, Sophia Antipolis, France.
oscar.rodriguez-rocha@inria.fr
2
Univ. Nice Sophia Antipolis, CNRS, I3S, UMR 7271, Sophia Antipolis, France
faron@unice.fr
Abstract. In the education field, in order to achieve learning goals, it
is necessary to define learning paths that foresee a gradual and incre-
mental acquisition of certain knowledge and skills that students should
acquire. In this paper we analyze the educational progressions of the
French educational system, we show how to formalize them through a
web ontology and how to perform knowledge extraction from the official
texts describing them to automate the population of such an ontology.
Keywords: e-Education, Ontologies, Semantic Web, Knowledge Ex-
traction, Knowledge Representation
1 Introduction
In the education field, in order to achieve learning goals, it is necessary to de-
fine learning paths that foresee a gradual and incremental acquisition of certain
knowledge and skills that students should acquire. Such educational programs
are usually defined by a body (a ministry or department of education) and then
implemented by the schools or institutes that are part of the educational system.
Nowadays it is not possible to find them in a standardized format that can be
accessible and queried automatically.
In this context, this paper proposes an answer to the following research ques-
tions:
1. How to model educational programs into a formal machine understandable
ontology that can be processed and queried?
2. How to extract the knowledge and skills that an educational program requires
from the official texts describing them?
3. How to automate the population of the ontology based on the extracted
knowledge?
4. How can we exploit these formal representations?
Our scientific contribution is first, a web ontology that describes and repre-
sents an official standard of knowledge and skills, in this case the French edu-
cational system. It is formalized in the OWL Web Ontology Language, which
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enables to process and query it with SPARQL, the standard query language for
the Web of data. Second, we propose a process to extract knowledge and skills
from the official texts describing the French educational program. Finally, we
propose a process to automatically populate our ontology with the knowledge
extracted from the official texts which we further enrich with the web of data.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents state
of the art approaches of ontology-based modeling in e-Education. Section 3 in-
troduces to the French common base of knowledge and skills for students as well
as the official educational progressions. In Section 4 we propose EduProgression:
an ontology to model the educational progressions of the French educational sys-
tem. We show, in Section 5, how to exploit the data of the progressions modeled
through EduProgression and its thesaurus. Section 6 presents our method to
automate the population of this ontology by extracting elements of knowledge
and skills from the official texts and Section 7 describes how to link them to
relevant resources available on the Web of Data. Finally, the conclusions and
future work are presented in Section 8.
2 Related work
The term of “educational ontology” covers very different types of ontologies,
modeling different kinds of knowledge related to e-Education. In [7], the au-
thors provide a literature survey of the development and use of ontologies in
the domain of e-learning systems. According to the classification proposed in
this survey, our work falls within the “curriculum modeling and management”
category. Among such works we have CURONTO [1, 2], an ontological model
designed for the management of a curriculum and to facilite program review and
assessment”. Compared to it, our ontology is not focused on giving the means to
conduct a review of the program nor an assessment; it focuses on the description
and representation of the knowledge and skills required by an educational system
and it provides the means to link knowledge and skills with resources from the
web of data.
In the same category, Gescur [4] is a tool dedicated to the management and
evaluation of the implementation of the curriculum, which facilitates the cur-
riculum management process”. It relies on an ontology of concepts relevant to
curriculum management in Secondary Schools, such as teachers, departments,
objectives, subjects, modules, tasks, documents, policies, activities, learning ob-
jects, quality criteria, etc. While this ontology focuses on the administration of
the curriculum ours focuses on the management of the knowledge and skills re-
quired in each school year in the French educational system. In this sense, both
ontologies could be complementary.
Besides the above cited literature review, the educational semantic web on-
tology proposed in [3] focuses on representing higher education concepts and
assisting specialized e-learning systems. In contrast to this work, we propose an
ontology that focuses on representing the elements of knowledge and skills of an
educational system.
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3
Finally, the OntoEdu educational platform architecture for e-Learning pro-
posed in [5], relies on an activity ontology that describes all the education activ-
ities and the relations among them, and a material ontology which describes the
educational content organization. The ontology is not available online, therefore
it is not possible neither to analyze its classes and properties nor to determine
the feasibility of use it in other scenarios outside the OntoEdu platform. Addi-
tionally their ontology does not contemplate the use of resources of the web of
data to enrich the educational material.
3 The French educational model
In France, there is an official common base of knowledge and skills created by
the Ministry of Education and published in the Official Journal; it is called the
“Socle commun de connaissances et de compétences” 3 . It states that, compulsory
education should at least guarantee to each student the necessary means to
acquire a common base consisting of a set of knowledge and skills that are
essential to master in order to successfully complete her education, build her
personal and professional future and succeed in her life in society. The French
common base is organized according to seven skills:
– Mastery of the French language
– Practice of a foreign language
– Basic math skills and scientific and technological culture
– Mastery of the common information and communication techniques
– Humanistic culture
– Social and civic competences
– Autonomy and initiative of the students
In order to organize a gradual acquisition of the knowledge and skills of
the French common base, some official learning progressions “Progressions pour
l’ecole elmentaire” 4 for the educational areas of the French elementary school
have been defined and published (official bulletin of January 5, 2012)5 . For each
elementary school cycle, the progressions are organized by area of education and
strictly follow the program labels to offer a comprehensive approach to knowl-
edge, skills and attitudes to be mastered by the students. Our study is based on
the analysis of these progressions (which are based on the French common base
of knowledge and skills). By generalizing them, we built a standard model of the
knowledge and skills necessary for the students through their educational path
and a method to automate the population of this model by extracting knowledge
from the texts describing these progressions. Being a standard model, it is also
3
http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/WAspad/UnTexteDeJorf?numjo=MENE0601554D
4
http://eduscol.education.fr/cid58402/progressions-pour-l-ecole-
elementaire.html
5
http://media.education.gouv.fr/file/1/58/7/programmes_ecole-primaire_
203587.pdf
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4
possible to model progressions from other educational systems in the world, such
as the U.S. academic standards6 defined by the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS)7 .
4 The EduProgression ontology and associated thesaurus
4.1 The EduProgression ontology
We created EduProgression, an ontological model for educational progressions,
formalized in the standard Ontology Web Language (OWL). Its main classes
are:
– Element of Knowledge and Skills (EKS). It is the key concept of our
model. It is represented by the EKS class, which is the central class of the
EduProgression ontology. An element of knowledge and skills is associated
to a set of knowledge pieces (class Knowledge) and skills (class Skill) for a
specific French school cycle (class Course) containing reference points (class
PointOfReference) and also a vocabulary of associated terms (class Vocab-
ulary). More precisely:
• Knowledge. Instances of class Knowledge are also instances of skos:Concept
and each one belongs to a skos:ConceptScheme that contains all the
knowledge pieces of a given progression. An instance of EKS is related to
an instance of Knowledge through the property hasKnowledge.
• Skill. An instance of EKS is related to an instance of Skill through
property hasSkill.
• Course. In the French educational system, skills that students are ex-
pected to develop, are defined by cycle and each cycle is organized into
courses. For example, “the consolidation cycle” includes “the second year
elementary course” (CE2), “the first-year intermediate course” (CM1)
and “the second year intermediate course” (CM2). In this context, an
instance of class Course represents a course in a cycle. An instance of
EKS is related to an instance of Course through property hasCourse.
• PointOfReference. An instance of class PointOfReference represents
an educational reference element on a specific element of knowledge and
skills (an instance of EKS). An instance of EKS is related to an instance
of class PointOfReference through property hasPointOfReference.
• VocabularyItem. Each element of knowledge and skills has vocabulary
items. An instance of EKS is related to an instance of class Vocabu-
laryItem through property hasVocabularyItem. A vocabulary item is
also an instance of skos:Concept and it is related to an instance of
skos:ConceptScheme which gathers the concepts of the thesaurus of
the progression.
6
http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/
7
http://www.corestandards.org/
63
5
– Progression. A progression is represented by an instance of class Progres-
sion. It can be associated to an existing learning domain (through property
hasLearningDomain) and to one or several EKSs (through property hasEKS).
– Learning domain. A learning domain is represented by an instance of the
LearningDomain class, and it is also an instance of skos:Concept that is
part of (only) one skos:ConceptScheme containing the only learning do-
mains of a progression. Also, as they are SKOS concepts, learning domains
are hierarchically organized by using the skos:broader and/or skos:narrower
properties. A learning domain can be associated to a Progression or an EKS.
Fig. 1. Classes and Properties of the EduProgression Ontology
The EduProgression ontology is freely accessible online.8 It is composed of
7 OWL classes and 8 OWL object properties. The relationships between them
can be seen in Figure 1.
The two following excerpt is the description of the History progression and a
related EKS representing the “european construction” based on EduProgression.
We highlight with three different colors the three different types of resources
related to specific thesaurus described in the following (see Section 4.2):
@prefix edp : < http :// ns . inria . fr / semed / eduprogression > .
edp : Histoire a edp : Progression ; rdfs : label " History " @en , " Histoire " @fr ;
edp : hasEKS edp : L a _ c o n s t r u c t i o n _ e u r o p e e n n e .
edp : L a _ c o n s t r u c t i o n _ e u r o p e e n n e a edp : EKS ;
rdfs : label " The european construction " @en ;
rdfs : label " La construction européenne " @fr ;
edp:hasKnowledge edp:Le_role_de_Robert_Schuman ;
edp:hasLearningDomain edp:Le_XXe_siecle_et_notre_epoque ;
8
http://ns.inria.fr/semed/eduprogression
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edp:hasVocabularyItem edp:Euro .
edp : hasCourse edp : CM2 ;
edp : h a s P o i n t O f R e f er e n c e edp : E u r o _ m o n n a i e _ e u r o p e e n n e ;
edp : h as R el a te d Re s ou r ce dbpedia - fr : Union_européenne ;
edp : hasSkill edp : P r i n c i p a l e s _ e t a p e s _ d e _ l a _ c o n s t r u c t i o n _ e u r o p e e n n e ;
4.2 Three thesaurus associated to each educational progression
Each formalized progression is associated to three thesaurus: one for its knowl-
edge pieces, one for its vocabulary items and another one containing its learning
domains. As a result, knowledge pieces, vocabulary items and learning domains
are represented by instance classes of the EduProgression ontology which also
are SKOS concepts belonging to one of these thesaurus. Grouping these elements
in thesaurus allows, among other benefits, to manage in a simple and structured
way the knowledge of each progression [6].
The following excerpt shows the structure of the three thesaurus of the pro-
gression of History (in blue the thesaurus of knowledge pieces, in green the
thesaurus of learning domains and in red the thesaurus of vocabulary items).
edp:ElementsConnaissanceHistoire a skos:ConceptScheme ;
skos:prefLabel "Knowledge pieces of History"@en .
skos:prefLabel "Elements de connaissance de l’Histoire"@fr .
edp:Le_role_de_Robert_Schuman a edp:Knowledge, skos:Concept ;
skos:inScheme edp:ElementsConnaissanceHistoire ;
skos:prefLabel "Know the role of Robert Schuman in European construction"@en .
skos:prefLabel "Connaître le rôle de Robert Schuman dans la construction européenne"@fr
.
edp:DomainesApprentissageHistoire a skos:ConceptScheme ;
skos:prefLabel "Learning domains of History"@en .
skos:prefLabel "Domaines d’apprentissage de l’Histoire"@fr .
edp:Le_XXe_siecle_et_notre_epoque a edp:LearningDomain, skos:Concept ;
skos:inScheme edp:DomainesApprentissageHistoire ;
skos:prefLabel "Elements of knowledge and skills on the twentieth century and our
time"@en ;
skos:prefLabel "Éléments de connaissances et de compétences sur le XXe siècle et notre
époque"@fr .
edp:VocabulaireHistoire a skos:ConceptScheme ;
skos:prefLabel "Vocabulary of History"@en ;
skos:prefLabel "Vocabulaire de l’Histoire"@fr .
edp:Euro a skos:Concept ;
skos:inScheme edp:VocabulaireHistoire ;
skos:prefLabel "Euro"@en, "Euro"@fr .
To give a clearer view of the elements of the History progression described
in the previous excerpts, Figure 2 presents it as a graph.
At the time of writing, we have created the thesaurus of the vocabulary,
knowledge pieces and learning domains relative to three progressions from the
French curricula: History, Geography and Experimental sciences and technology,
and we have populated the EduProgression ontology with the concepts in these
thesaurus. For the progression on History, we identified 29 elements of knowledge
and skills (instances of edp:EKS), the thesaurus of vocabulary items comprises
131 concepts, the thesaurus of knowledge pieces 45 concepts and the thesaurus
of learning domains 7 concepts. For the progression of Geography, 32 elements
of knowledge and skills were identified; its thesaurus of vocabulary items is com-
posed of 131 concepts; its thesaurus of knowledge pieces and learning domains
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Fig. 2. Graph of the History progression excerpt
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contaisn 34 and 6 concepts respectively. Finally, the pogression of Experimental
sciences and technology was populated with a total of 50 elements of knowledge
and skills; It has the largest vocabulary since it comprises 265 elements. Its the-
saurus of knowledge pieces was populated with 40 concepts while its thesaurus
of learning domains with 10 concepts. These thesaurus can be freely accessed
online: http://ns.inria.fr/semed/eduprogression/thesaurus.
5 Exploitation of EduProgression and the associated
thesaurus
As the EduProgression ontology has been populated, we can exploit it with
SPARQL queries. For example, to retrieve the EKS required for the students
attending the second year intermediate course (CM2) of History, we can use the
following query:
PREFIX edp : < http :// ns . inria . fr / semed / eduprogression # >
PREFIX rdfs : < http :// www . w3 . org /2000/01/ rdf - schema # >
SELECT ? eks
WHERE {
? h i s t o r y _ pr o g r e s s i o n a edp : Progression .
? h i s t o r y _ pr o g r e s s i o n rdfs : label " History " @en .
? h i s t o r y _ pr o g r e s s i o n edp : hasEKS ? eks .
? eks edp : hasCourse edp : CM2 . }
Similarly, we can retrieve the required vocabulary for the first-year interme-
diate course (CM1) of Geography, within the learning domain of “Elements of
knowledge and skills on the territories at different scales”.
PREFIX edp : < http :// ns . inria . fr / semed / eduprogression # >
PREFIX rdfs : < http :// www . w3 . org /2000/01/ rdf - schema # >
SELECT ? vocabulary_item
WHERE {
? g e o g r a p h y _ p r o g r e s s i o n a edp : Progression .
? g e o g r a p h y _ p r o g r e s s i o n rdfs : label " Geography " @en .
? g e o g r a p h y _ p r o g r e s s i o n edp : hasEKS ? eks .
? eks edp : hasCourse edp : CM1 .
? eks edp : has Lea rni ngD oma in edp :
ECC_sur_les_territoires_a_differentes_echelles .
? eks edp : has Voc abu lar yIt em ? vocabulary_item . }
Finally, the following query allows to retrieve the necessary knowledge pieces
of History and Experimental sciences and technology for the second year elemen-
tary course (CE2).
PREFIX edp : < http :// ns . inria . fr / semed / eduprogression # >
PREFIX rdfs : < http :// www . w3 . org /2000/01/ rdf - schema # >
SELECT ? knowledge
WHERE {
? progression a edp : Progression .
{? progression rdfs : label " Geography " @en }
UNION
{? progression rdfs : label " Experimental sciences and technology " @en }
? progression edp : hasEKS ? eks .
? eks edp : hasCourse edp : CE2 .
? eks edp : hasKnowledge ? knowledge . }
It is important to note that thanks to the EduProgression ontology it is
possible to make queries to the existing progressions filtered by specific courses.
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This is the basis for the implementation of educational applications adapted to
each student profile.
6 Knowledge extraction from texts and formalization
For the extraction of the information contained in the progressions for elementary
school we had to consider first, that the progressions are only available in PDF
format, that is, a PDF document for each learning domain. The data contained
in each PDF, was inside tables without a standard format, therefore, when we
tried to use common techniques for PDF data extraction9 such as OCR or data
extraction from tables10 , the resulting extracted text was mixed among various
tables and/or incomplete.
This first led us to perform a preliminary manual extraction of knowledge
from text. The first process that we experimented aimed at directly extracting
RDF data from PDF texts. This involved to copy textual data directly from each
PDF file, and then to paste it into an RDF description as literal values of some
RDF triples (also manually written). Not only this process was time-consuming
but also it was prone to human errors in the format of the data and the resulting
RDF triples.
To solve these problems, we split the data extraction process in two steps,
the first one consisting in manually filling a JSON intermediate data structure,
the second one consisting in automatically transforming JSON data into RDF
data. We designed an intermediate data structure in JSON format in which we
represented each progression as a JSON object containing the following infor-
mation:
– The name of the progression
– An array of the different learning sub domains involved in the progression
– A dictionary with the French scholar courses covered
– An array of the elements of knowledge and skills (EKS) involved in the
progression. Each EKS itself contains:
• a title and a description in French
• the scholar cycle covered by this EKS
• the learning domain covered by this EKS
• a dictionary of the knowledge pieces (titles and descriptions in French)
required by this EKS
• a dictionary containing the required skills (titles and descriptions in
French) required by this EKS
• an array of the vocabulary items required by this EKS
• an array of points of reference required by this EKS
9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
10
http://tabula.technology/
68
10
This allowed us to manually fill the data structure in a much faster and much
more reliable way. In addition, in order to validate the format of the data, we de-
fined a JSON schema11 representing these aforementioned structural constraints.
This enabled us to automatically validated the JSON objects representing a pro-
gression manually entered.
As a second step, we defined and performed an automatic conversion pro-
cess of JSON objects into RDF graphs. It uses the EduProgression ontology to
automatically generate an RDF graph.
The following excerpt is the intermediate JSON representation of the EKS
on the Age of Discovery, which conversion in RDF is presented in the excerpt of
section 4.2, which illustrates the use of the EduProgression ontology.
" EKSs ": [{
" short_label ": [{" fr ": " Les Grandes Découvertes " , " en ": " Age of Discovery
"}] ,
" label ": [{" fr ": " Les Grandes Découvertes " , " en ": " Age of Discovery "}] ,
" course ": " CE2 " ,
" learningDomain ": " ECC sur les Temps Modernes " ,
" knowledge ": [{
" short_label ": [{" fr ": " Les Européens se lancent à la découverte
du monde "}] ,
" label ": [{" fr ": " Savoir que les Européens se lancent à la d
ecouverte du monde grâce notamment aux progrès de la
cartographie et de la navigation "}]
}] ,
" skills ": [{
" short_label ": [{" fr ": " Raconter le voyage de Christophe Colomb
"}] ,
" label ": [{" fr ": "Être capable de raconter le voyage de
Christophe Colomb et la découverte d ’ un nouveau monde "}]
}] ,
" p o i n t s _ o f _r e f e r e n c e ": []
} ,...
]
7 Entity Linking
We enriched the EduProgression ontology and its related thesaurus by conduct-
ing an entity linking process. It allows us to link the EKS instances of our
already populated progressions, with DBpedia resources related to the textual
values of the properties describing EKS instances. The information provided by
these linked resources may be further exploited directly as learning material or
to discover related learning resources.
To make this possible, we have created an automated process that first ex-
tracts literal values of the properties of each EKS and builds a textual repre-
sentation of the latter by concatenating these literal values, and then retrieves
the related DBpedia resources by using the DBpedia spotlight web service. The
process is as follows:
1. All the instances of EKS are retrieved from the populated progressions. This
is the result of a SELECT SPARQL query processed by a SPARQL engine
on our local triple store.
11
http://json-schema.org/
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11
2. For each retrieved EKS instance, the textual values of its properties are
extracted and concatenated into a string which will be considered as a whole
as the EKS text representation.
3. The process takes each EKS text representation and analyzes it by using
the DBPedia Spotlight web service.
4. Each related resource obtained from the previous step is linked to the EKS
by using the edp:hasRelatedResource property of EduProgression. This is
done with an INSERT SPARQL query applied to our triple store.
The whole process is shown in Figure 3.
Fig. 3. Process to link EKS instances of a given progression to DBpedia resources
Currently, our process creates links between EKS instances and related re-
sources in DBpedia. We chose to link EKS since they are conceived in our model
as the main concept that represents skills and knowledge. Eventually, for other
case studies, the EduProgression ontology could be adapted in such a way that
the property hasRelatedResource can be applied to other types of instances,
among which skills, knowledge pieces and vocabulary items, making it possible
to link their instances with related resources from the web of data.
As a result of our process, we have obtained 187 resources related to the
EKSs of the Geography progression with a precision of 94%, 205 for the History
progression with a precision of 95% and 220 for the progression of Experimental
Sciences and technology with 94% of precision. For these experiments DBpedia
was configured with a confidence of 0.15 and a support of 20.
8 Conclusions and future work
In this paper, we have shown how to model an educational program by formal-
izing it as a Web ontology in OWL that is understandable by machines and
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that can be queried and processed. In particular, we have taken as a case study
the French education system, from which we have extracted and formalized ed-
ucational progressions in an ontology called EduProgression. We sketched how
this ontology can be used through some example SPARQL queries. We have
described a process for populating the EduProgression ontology, by extracting
the knowledge elements and skills involved in the educational progressions from
the official texts describing these progressions. Additionally, we showed how we
managed to automatically link the ontology instances to Web resources.
At the time of writing, the current “Socle commun de connaissances et de
compétences” in France (which constitutes the basis of this work) is that of 2006.
As of September 2016, an update to such document will be made12 , although it
will involve minor changes, this scientific work will be adapted accordingly.
Future work includes the use of the EduProgression ontology and its related
thesaurus for the indexation of educational resources to the French curricula
through our ontology, with the aim of recommending them to students in their
learning path. This activity will be performed in collaboration with our two
industrial partners. In addition, we look forward to apply this work to other
educational systems in the world as suggested in Section 3.
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http://cache.media.education.gouv.fr/file/17/45/6/Socle_commun_de_
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