A social semantic repository for special needs education

The main problem that characterises the context of Special Education is the availability of a large amount of available information and its real, pertinent usability. The use of software systems for the semantic annotation and retrieval of teaching resources for this field appears to be still little explored, also due to the lack of specific semantic models for information description. This paper introduces the Knowledge Hub, a semantic repository of educational and information resources for Special Education, which is able to assist practitioners and teachers in finding the most interesting and useful digital resources for each special need by combining recommendation techniques with Semantic and Social Web models and tools. The paper also describes the encouraging results of a system experimentation with real users. © 2013 IEEE.