KMi Seminars
Greenstone Tales
This event took place on Thursday 11 February 2010 at 14:00

 
Dr David Bainbridge University of Waikato, New Zealand

The Greenstone software typifies what we have perhaps come to think of as the "classic" form of digital library: Web based with access to content through searching and browsing. Countless digital libraries have been formed with Greenstone since its release on SourceForge in 2000: from historic newspapers to books on humanitarian aid; from eclectic multimedia content on pop-artists to curated First editions of works by Chopin; from scientific institutional repositories to personal collections of photos and numerous other document formats. In this talk I will track the history of the project and reflect on the lessons we have learned over this time. Greenstone is also a highly versatile framework for research. In our lab we are experimenting with forms of digital library software that challenge the status quo. In this talk I will demonstrate a range of these prototypes. In particular:

A realistic books visualizer that brings back many of the advantages of the codex that were lost with the move to accessing content through Web pages and its ubiquitous scroll-bar.

An iPod that has been reprogrammed to become a self-contained portable digital library that has truly vast storage -- available at your fingertips, wherever you are.

Seamless Web editing that removes the barrier between readership and authorship. Edit *any* Web page in the world, and have it stored in your own private digital library for later access.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

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.