![](bg6.png)
Figure 6: Visualization of the results of the Relation
Inspector.
A possible workflow for an assignment author
would be to draw a reference “expert sketch”
without any ontology or agent support. This set of
labeled glyphs could then first be inserted as
unconnected instances into the ontology. After that
the Relation Inspector agent could propose some
relations that are found between the given glyphs for
adding it to the ontology representation. However,
the author would presumably not transfer all these
relations to the ontology, since though many of them
are evident, only some are probably necessary for
the assignment. In the example of Figure 2 for
instance, it would not be necessary to have the waste
disposal facility in the north of the residential area.
After importing these relations, the FreeStyler plug-
in for students could immediately interpret this
newly defined assignment.
Such an authoring environment would be a
bridge from a static, predefined knowledge base to a
dynamic one. An authoring environment would also
allow the user to modify already existing
conceptualizations in the knowledge base. That
means, adding, removing or updating spatial entities
and spatial relations among them.
Beside these technical improvements a study
could be conducted to investigate on the effect that
this tutoring system has on the learning process of
users. This study could compare students’ solution
without the tutoring system and solutions that make
use of the system in order to find out whether the
usage of the system will lead to solutions that are
fulfilling more restrictions of the assignment. As the
system allows for sharing the glyphs between
different users, the study could also investigate on
advantages of a collaborative creation of glyphs.
Another interesting question is the comparison
between pen and paper based modeling and the
usage of the presented system on tablet computers
which could focus on usability issues of the system
when using tablet computers.
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