KMi Seminars
MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Tuesday 07 June 2011 at 14:00

 
Traian Rebedea “Politehnica” University of Bucharest

In most educational scenarios, the learners that use online discussions such as instant messaging and discussion forums never receive feedback for their conversations, especially due to the fact that such an analysis is very difficult and time consuming for tutors. This is the main problem that PolyCAFe is addressing by providing automatic feedback to learners and by supporting tutors in the analysis of their students’ multi-party online discussions.

PolyCAFe produces various kinds of information about discussions in chats and forums, both quantitative and qualitative, such as metrics (e.g. the relative importance of each utterance, learner grades both globally and for particular features like the involvement in the collaboration), and content analysis results (such as the coverage of the key concepts to be discussed and the discourse threads). PolyCAFe also provides visual feedback about the interactions and the social participation. The visualization of the conversations is interactive; that means the learners and tutors may explore different perspectives and discussion threads, they may view implicit links discovered by the system between utterances or posts and they may see the threading of using different concepts.

 
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.