Validation of a Semantic Search Engine for Academic Resources on Engineering Teamwork

Abstract

Obtaining evidence on the acquisition of the teamwork competence, from students throughout their training, is demanded by both accrediting agencies of High Education degrees and future employers. This competence has been, and still is, of great importance in general and in degrees in engineering in particular. Based on previous research studies, evidence to evaluate teamwork competence acquisition is classified in three dimensions: (i) the individual dimension, acquired by each team member; (ii) the group dimension, composed of results from each teamwork; and (iii) the result dimension, which consists of deliverable products throughout the teamwork process. One of the methods which takes the three dimensions into account, the one that helps train and evaluate the teamwork competence, is the ‘‘Comprehensive Training Model of the Teamwork Competence’’ method. In this paper, we will show that through this method, more than 50 teams have generated evidence which can be used as learning resources. All this evidence has been stored and organized (through an ontology) in a semantic repository. The generated evidence is retrieved by using an inference engine through the metadata of ontology. This study, which has validated the resources obtained from the repository, was relevant for a specific information demand. To this end, results automatically obtained by the search engine were compared with those manually found by teachers who are experienced in the teamwork competence.