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KMi Seminars
PhD Skills
This event took place on Monday 12 September 2005 at 10:00

Prof. Brigid Heywood PVC Research and Staff, The OU

PhD Skills is web-based scheme to support OU research students in developing the skills they will need to pursue and complete their doctorates successfully and on time. Crucially, it will enable us to fulfil our obligations under the revised QAA Code of Practice for PhD students in readiness for the QAA audit in December.

This year the scheme is in its pilot phase, and will be available to our new intake of full- and part-time students at their induction conference on 11th September. Supervisors play a crucial role in their students' skills development, and so the scheme has been designed to actively enable their participation - and to save them work by putting information at their fingertips.

The other key feature of the scheme is that it is designed to work at three different levels of specificity:
  1. Generic;
  2. Faculty/ Research Centre; and
  3. Discipline/Department/Research Group

The briefing
This briefing is for staff such as Heads of Department, Associate Deans of Research and Directors of Graduate Studies. Its purposes are to:
  • demonstrate the scheme, explain its functions and show how it links to the new arrangements for probation assessment for PhD students;
  • show how the scheme can be customised at the three different levels of specificity, and enable work to start on this task (i.e. Faculties and Departments to tailor the information supplied to students to their specific needs and opportunities).
  • prompt Faculties, Research Groups and Departments to begin informing, training and supporting their supervisors.
Click to download the PowerPoint slides

 
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.