Context-aware retrieval of learning units

Complex working environments call for flexible employees willing to continuously increase their knowledge and to adapt to new processes. As a consequence a lot of time has to be spent on the search for appropriate information and learning material. We present a new approach for semantic retrieval of learning units considering the working context. Basis is an ontology with attached binding weights and semantic spreading activation to get a context-aware ranking of suitable learning units. The gained semantic search results may fit better to the learner's actual situation than e.g. a pure full-text search, because the underlying ontology-based retrieval is aware of relations in the search domain and uses this knowledge in a way aligned to the learning process as well as to the specific domain. The results are shown in a prototype implementation for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image interpretation.