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KMi Seminars
An investigation of the use of semantic web technologies to support learning
This event took place on Wednesday 16 March 2005 at 12:30

 
Michele Pasin KMi, The Open University

A search engine like google can help us find a list of resources, connected merely by a string similarity, and, as we know, many times it fails in answering our initial research question. Of course this happens because a computer can hardly understand the sense of our words, but treats them only syntactically, namely, taking into account their external shape and not their meaning.

If the normal web we browse daily can be seen as a huge repository of this kind of "meaningless" information, the project of the semantic web consists of a meta layer built on top, in order to describe it and make it more meaningful. While researchers from all over the world are trying to find the most effective ways for annotating the "old" web, new perspectives are emerging in the area of computer based learning.

In fact, in a scenario where resources are annotated and could be found on the web, instead of a normal search engine we could have an intelligent knowledge browser that, given a goal, follows some pre-existing knowledge patterns, gathering a set of resources that fulfill the goal. For example, I could ask this software agent to help me understanding a specific concept in physics, and receive back a series of knowledge elements that, properly digested, will bring me to the understanding of that concept.

This talk will introduce the theoretical and practical implications of such a knowledge browser, and the first ontological engineering of a domain, philosophy, where the browser will be instanced.

Download PowerPoint Presentation (576Kb ZIP file)

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
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

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities