KMi Seminars
MUP/PLE lecture series
This event took place on Friday 15 July 2011 at 14:00

 
Allison Littlejohn Glasgow Caledonian University

Current trends towards networked communities and digital citizenship, as well as workplace changes including distributed/collaborative work patterns and an (arguably) higher value being placed on 'knowledge' work, all make digital capabilities central to what postgraduate education can offer. While efforts are being made to support students' ICT and information skills – or at least bring these up to a minimum standard of competence – we argue that these are not being followed through the postgraduate experience in a coherent way, or integrated with the development of other capabilities critical to higher learning. Universities are typically not focused on producing researchers who can investigate, study and learn in technology-rich environments. In this session we will explores the nature of digital literacies and implications for researcher development. The presentation is based on a theoretical review of the literature as part of the Learning Literacies for a Digital Age study carried out by Allison Littlejohn, Helen Beetham and Lou McGill (available from http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/llida/)

 
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.