Working at KMi

Job Vacancies [1]

Studentships [1]
 

News

 
About KMi

Knowledge Media Institute Concept Videos

1994 KMi Virtual Summer School and Future Concept Videos


While working towards the creation of the Knowledge Media Institute in late 1994, Marc Eisenstadt, Tom Vincent and Kitty Chisholm, with support from then-Vice-Chancellor Sir John Daniel, commissioned a team working under the direction of Clive Holloway at the BBC to create a 'concept video'. Their brief was to explain in around 7 minutes what the future of the Open University might be in the rapidly-emerging landscape of new knowledge media technologies.

The concept video was itself inspired by a bold (and ultimately amusing) 'near-miss' attempt to give Open University students a taster of these new experiences during a 1994 "Virtual Summer School". This relied on a series of "best of breed" technologies, including the Mosaic web browser, CU-SeeMe video, and 14.4Kbps dial-up modems! Even with these new and basic technologies, much was learned during the experience, and this ultimately influenced the direction of KMi and the OU over the ensuing decade.

The video sequence includes excerpts from Virtual Summer School, including a segment where it goes horribly wrong, and the full Concept Video. The video itself was not formally "released" because of concerns by the commissioning team about an audience backlash against the emotional "coldness" of the future landscape, but is presented here for historical interest, and for the way in which it reveals the forward-looking nature of some 1994 experiments undertaken in the "early boom" era of the Internet.


 
The Open University
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.