Hi there, Semantic Web technologies have many applications in e-learning. Feel free to take a look at the following papers of ours:

Feel free to contact me if you need further details.

Best,

Stratos

http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticle.php?artid=14217

Article An ontology-based planning system for e-course generation

Dear Friend

Take a Look at Protegé to develop the RDF Ontologies regarding your knowledge representation and some triple-store technology to store and share among the community your educational information. 

Hi there,

Check SlideWiki for organizing course materials, student groups and collaborative editing.

http://slidewiki.org/

I agree that the best tool for developing ontologies is Protege. It rocks and the support, given its a free ware tool, is great. You might want to check out the book Semantic Web Programming. They have a nice description and example code for putting together a basic Semantic Web environment, with IDE, Jenna, Protege, etc.

As for the methodology I would recommend using Agile Methods. I have to confess to being an Agile zealot. I would probably recommend it for most custom software development but in the case of Semantic Web development I think it is especially appropriate. Agile was first used with new emerging technologies like (what was new at the time) OOP. In those kinds of situations where the technology can enable new business opportunities that might not be obvious up front. Also, Agile is strong where design is something that emerges from the bottom up as much as is designed from the top down and I think that is the case with the Semantic Web. Its really one of the selling points of tools like Protege which enable ongoing redefining of your domain model and integration with inconsistent data models and implementations (triple stores, object stores, RDB, web pages, etc)

Hi Sibangiso.

As for the tools or technologies you could use to develop semantic web for e-learning, several of them exist but I think your choice should depend on what exactly you want to achieve considering the pros and cons of those technologies.

Of course, some fundamental tools are Protege (version 3.x if you want to create ontology of OWL 1 or version 4.x if you are interested in working with OWL2). choose between Jena or Jess for your rule engine, Pellet or Hermit for your reasoner...

In all of these, you would need to know their compatibility while you try to achieve your aim, whether they are  are FOSS or Licensed and a host of other stuff.