The aim of this paper is to present an innovative approach for generating multiple choice questions in automatic way. Although other approaches have been already reported in the literature, the approach presented in this paper is based on domain specific ontologies and it is independent of lexicons such as WordNet or other linguistic resources. The paper also reports on a first prototype implementation of such an approach which creates multiple choice question items using the Semantic Web standard technology OWL (Ontology Web Language). The proposed approach is independent of the domain since questions are generated according to specific ontology-based strategies. In current implementation, simple natural language generation techniques are used in order to provide the items in the questionnaires. KEYWORDS Ontologies, multiple choice questions, assessment