Our paper presents the results of a two years’ research project aimed at adopting semantic web technology to draft the IEP (Individualized Education Plan) for pupils with special educational needs in Italian school.

Individualized Education Plan (IEP) is a document which defines academic/life goals, methods and kind of educational intervention in order to obtain these goals for pupils with special educational needs at school. It is generally designed using the functional diagnosis; health service is primarily responsible of this diagnosis, but also teachers are involved in the defining of subject’s functioning.

Many problems about different cultural and professional perspectives of health and school professionals have emerged and have been discussed. The strict medical model has often collided with the educational model, so functional diagnosis is faced with some difficulties.

However, there have been some positive changes with the introduction of World Health Organization’s ICF, the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health as a stimulus to evolve functional diagnosis.

ICF is an anthropological model that allows to consider the relationship among body structures and functional dimensions, personal activities, environmental and personal factors in order to plan a life project, helping not only the educational but also the social inclusion.

This innovative model allows to understand, describe and share pupil’s functioning. It could be positively used by school professionals and health professionals at an intenrational level and it gives the opportunity to use a bio-psycho-social conceptualization of health and functioning.

In order to facilitate the design of the IEP, we developed a web-based decision support system, called ePlanning. Users put information about relevant aspects of the pupil’s profile into the system and the system guides the users in defining the appropriate goals, the most suitable activities and helpful material to achieve these goals.

This technological system shows a collaborative building of a high-quality ontology; in particularly a team composed by 20 users with different but complementary competences and skills has been involved during the development: psychologists, educators, teachers, knowledge engineers and application engineers.

With ePlanning, the draft of an IEP becomes the result of a collaborative activity which involves teachers, parents, health professionals and the student, whenever possible.

By themselves, the school special educational team and the teachers' observations would not be sufficient to address the complex needs of many students with special educational needs. However, implemented as part of the services that the IEP team develops, this tool can contribute to a systemic, complete and functional plan for student success.

We hope that our ePlanning/SOFIA research project/tool and all the other learnt lessons may benefit similar modelling initiatives, regarding the development of ontology-based application in practical case, in particular in the psycho-educational field.

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