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)
This event took place on Wednesday 16 March 2005 at 12:30
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)
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...
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.
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