A Personalization Web Service for Curricula Planning and Validation

In this work we present a service-oriented personalization system, set in an education framework, which allows to perform two tasks, based on a semantic annotation of a set of courses, given at a knowledge level (what the course teaches, what is requested to know for attending it in a profitable way). On the one hand, users are supported in building personalized curricula, formalized by means of an action theory. On the other hand, it is possible to verify the soundness of curricula w.r.t. a model, that expresses constraints and dependencies at a knowledge level. For what concerns the first task, classical planning techniques are adopted, which take into account both the student's context (the initial knowledge) and her learning goal (what she wants to learn). Instead, curricula validation is done against a model, which is formalized as a set of time constraints. In this framework, it is possible to perform various interesting verication tasks by using temporal reasoning. The Curriculum Planning Service has been integrated as a new plug-and-play personalization service in the Personal Reader framework. We have developed a prototype of the validation system by using the well-known SPIN model checker.