A DSL Tool to Assist Specifications of Educational Settings

Abstract

Some authors had already mentioned the similarities between the life cycle of e-business and e-learning processes, and argue about the possibility of reusing in the e-learning field the past experiences and techniques used within the Business Process Management (BPM) area. The automation in the e-business field is bringing important benefits to the organizations and enterprises, but the same is not happening in the e-learning environment. Several standards have been created and are being effectively used in the context of e-business, such as the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Unfortunately, that is not the case in the e-learning where some standards have been created but they are not as widely used as in e-business. In addition, some necessary artifacts are still inexistent in e-learning, such a process specification language similar to BPMN to represent generic e-learning processes. Hence, the article presents a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to specify graphically processes in e-learning environments. The presented DSL is composed of a graphical language derived from BPMN, a tool that supports the specification and a metamodel (ontology) that is used to define the concrete semantics of each language element.