Tech Reports
Tech Report kmi-00-13 Abstract
Using genre to support active participation in learning communities
Techreport ID: kmi-00-13
Date: 2000
Author(s): Trevor Collins, Paul Mulholland and Stuart Watt
Many communities exist that learn and share information either partly or wholly online. These (wholly or partially) on-line communities share messages, documents, and other artefacts that contain useful community knowledge. Members of the community learn through this sharing process, and the growing archive they create forms a valuable learning resource for existing and new members of the community. Two main kinds of approach exist to support community members in accessing resources. The first kind associates each communal artefact with a conceptual structure that represents its meaning. This approach requires high levels of maintenance, especially when the community resource grows at a fast rate. The second uses statistical and text analysis techniques to (semi) automatically derive semantics from the resource. There is increasing evidence that artefacts constructed and shared within a community follow genres revealed in the structure of the artefacts and the terminology used. These implicit genres used in the community are invaluable to members in constructing and interpreting artefacts, but existing tools that support members in locating and classifying resources make little or no use of genre. Our preliminary findings demonstrate the potential of genre-sensitive classification and retrieval tools.
Future Internet
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...
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.
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