Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-05-07 Abstract

Semantic Learning Narratives: An Investigation of the Usage of Semantic Web Technologies to Support Learning
Techreport ID: kmi-05-07
Date: 2005
Author(s): Michele Pasin

This report is about the intersections between narrative hypermedia and semantic web technologies for eLearning. Although various research has enhanced the hypermedia field by making use of semantic web technologies, there is little work in order to pitch this approach to an educational perspective. Actual eLearning technologies, focusing on the definition and re-use of learning objects (LO), often sacrifice the expressiveness of the metadata descriptors to the reusability of a resource. This leads to shallow semantic annotations, and consequently, from a pedagogical point of view, to a poor sequencing of the learning objects. In the first part of this report, we want to help the reader contextualize this problem and realize how it can be solved through the usage of domain ontologies, describing the important concepts in an area, and narrative ontologies, describing the fundamental pathways within a semantic space. In the second part of this work, instead we show how the instantiation of these two dimensions within a specific domain, philosophy, will allow us firstly to develop an application to test these ideas, secondly to compare other similar approaches and look out for an abstract layer of learning narratives independent from any domain.

Publication(s):

Semantic Learning Narratives, Pasin M., Motta E., SWED Workshop, KCAP-05, Banff, Canada.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection