Tag: standards

MnM – Ontology Driven Semi-Automatic and Automatic Support for Semantic Web

“MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating information extraction tools.” ok….

See also Amilcare (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/amilcare/) an “adaptive Information Extraction (IE) system intended as support to document annotation in the Semantic Web framework” and Dot.Kom (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/dot.kom/) another tool for the “automatic or semi-automatic … extraction of information from web-related documents.”

In fact the the entire Knowledge Media Institute site at the Open University is utterly fascinating.

And finally a ‘backwards link’ search on the MnM page leads to http://annotation.semanticweb.org/tools which I wish I had found earlier – a seemingly authoritative list of semantic web authoring and annotation tools. – SWL

e-Learning Policies Comparison Site

Some of you know that I work part-time as a researcher on course management software for the Edutools project. But the scope of the Edutools project was always meant to be larger than just course management software. The intent has been to extend the model of comparative analysis and idealized decision making to other technologies and areas of concern for educational technologists, instructors and administrators.

Yesterday the latest part of the site was announced – the e-Learning Policy site which “ focuses on the unique policy issues that are created by the e-delivery of higher education courses and programs,” specifically the major policy areas of:

  • Funding
  • Intellectual Property
  • Quality Assurance
  • Transfer and Articulation
  • Tuition
  • Fees

In addition to providing background and related links on these policy areas, the new site allows you to search the database for policy excerpts and synopses from specific institutions using a large number of criteria and compare these policies in a side-by-side manner. If you use the site and find it useful, please let the good folks at WCET know. – SWL 

MetaMap – Graphical Map of Metadata and other Standards Initiatives

“The MetaMap is a pedagogical graphic which takes the form of a subway map. Its aim is to help the information science community to understand metadata standards, sets, and initiatives of interest in this area.“

Now this is extremely cool and helpful – this map shows both what issues particular standards and initiatives try to address (the ‘lines’ they reside on), the media types they apply to (the colours of the subway ‘lines’)  and also the interrelation of various standards and initiatives (where the lines have shared ‘stops’). Cooler still is that it seems to run off of (or at least have a connection to) a structured directory that catalogues these standards and initiatives. Does require the SVG plugin, and they explain why they have chosen this format. – SWL 

– via David Mattison’s [TenThousandYearBlog] which I subscribe to, yet only found this by chance as his main RSS feed seems to be broken. Still, dig further into his categories as he is still blogging and finding great stuff.

SWAD-Europe: Semantic web applications – analysis and selection

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/
open_demonstrators/hp-applications-survey.html#OntoShare

“This report concerns the selection of two open demonstrator applications designed to both illustrated the nature of the semantic web and to explore issues involved in developing substantial semantic web applications given the current state of the art.“

Another great collection of pointers to applications that illustrate the potential wide-ranging uses of meta-data and the semantic web. This list is sorted into the following categories of use, useful in and of itself for illustrating the motivations behind the semantic web initiative:

  • Catalogue/thesaurus management
  • Data dependent agents
  • Data integration
  • Knowledge formation
  • Knowledge management
  • Metadata for annotation and enrichment
  • Metadata for discovery and selection
  • Metadata for media and content
  • Ontology Management
  • Personal information management
  • Semantic indexing
  • Syndication Category

 

The Standard Bearers Close Ranks

http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7359

This article does a good job of laying out the broad field of elearning standards bodies, and is a good starting point for the uninitiated. I guess what I was hoping for, though, was a little more info on what form the collaboration between the various groups was going to take(cf. the news release from IMS last October on inter-initiative collaboration at http://www.imsproject.org/pressrelease/pr021031.cfm). Of even greater interest would be simply whether some of these initiatives are still active at all (I could be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to have been any activity on the OKI site or announcement list for months! And there are other  initiatives within higher ed, e.g. HEKATE, in regards to which I am really interested to know if anything will ever transpire).