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KMi Seminars
MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Tuesday 10 May 2011 at 14:00

 
Scott Wilson Institute for Educational Cybernetics, University of Bolton

Smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, in-car systems, games consoles, interactive whiteboards: the range and sophistication of Internet-enabled devices that users are working and learning with has expanded dramatically in recent years, and when discussing personal and institutional technologies we now mean a whole range of form factors and features, some of which did not exist in usable form only 5 years ago.

However we've also seen a convergence of the types of capabilities these devices bring to users, and in particular how a strong role is emerging for web standards like HTML5 in creating the next generation of software applications for all kinds of platforms.

In this talk we'll look at the roadmap for flexible applications (widgets) based on current and planned work in W3C, and explore some of the challenges that have emerged in current projects for using widget technologies to deliver compelling mashups that take advantage of the features offered by today's - and future - devices.

 
KMi Seminars
 

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.