Collaborative Authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia by Enriching a Semantic Wiki’s Output

This research is concerned with harnessing collaborative approaches for the authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) systems. It involves the enhancement of Semantic Wikis with pedagogy aware features to this end. There are many challenges in understanding how communities of interest can efficiently collaborate for learning content authoring, in introducing pedagogy to the developed knowledge models and in specifying user models for efficient delivery of AEH systems. The contribution of this work will be the development of a model of collaborative authoring which includes domain specification, content elicitation, and definition of pedagogic approach. The proposed model will be implemented in a prototype AEH authoring system that will be tested and evaluated in a formal education context

Towards OpenMath Content Dictionaries as Linked Data

"The term 'Linked Data' refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the web". Linked Data make the Semantic Web work practically, which means that information can be retrieved without complicated lookup mechanisms, that a lightweight semantics enables scalable reasoning, and that the decentral nature of the Web is respected. OpenMath Content Dictionaries (CDs) have the same characteristics - in principle, but not yet in practice. The Linking Open Data movement has made a considerable practical impact: Governments, broadcasting stations, scientific publishers, and many more actors are already contributing to the "Web of Data". Queries can be answered in a distributed way, and services aggregating data from different sources are replacing hard-coded mashups. However, these services are currently entirely lacking mathematical functionality. I will discuss real-world scenarios, where today's RDF-based Linked Data do not quite get their job done, but where an integration of OpenMath would help - were it not for certain conceptual and practical restrictions. I will point out conceptual shortcomings in the OpenMath 2 specification and common bad practices in publishing CDs and then propose concrete steps to overcome them and to contribute OpenMath CDs to the Web of Data.Comment: Presented at the OpenMath Workshop 2010, http://cicm2010.cnam.fr/om

Design Research and Domain Representation

While diverse theories about the nature of design research have been proposed, they are rarely considered in relation to one another across the broader disciplinary field. Discussions of design research paradigms have tended to use overarching binary models for understanding differing knowledge frameworks. This paper focuses on an analysis of theories of design research and the use of Web 3 and open content systems to explore the potential of building more relational modes of conceptual representation. The nature of this project is synthetic, building upon the work of other design theorists and researchers. A number of theoretical frameworks will be discussed and examples of the analysis and modelling of key concepts and information relationships, using concept mapping software, collaborative ontology building systems and semantic wiki technologies will be presented. The potential of building information structures from content relationships that are identified by domain specialists rather than the imposition of formal, top-down, information hierarchies developed by information scientists, will be considered. In particular the opportunity for users to engage with resources through their own knowledge frameworks, rather than through logically rigorous but largely incomprehensible ontological systems, will be explored in relation to building resources for emerging design researchers. The motivation behind this endeavour is not to create a totalising meta-theory or impose order on the ‘ill structured’ and ‘undisciplined’, domain of design. Nor is it to use machine intelligence to ‘solve design problems’. It seeks to create dynamic systems that might help researchers explore design research theories and their various relationships with one another. It is hoped such tools could help novice researchers to better locate their own projects, find reference material, identify knowledge gaps and make new linkages between bodies of knowledge by enabling forms of data-poesis - the freeing of data for different trajectories. Keywords: Design research; Design theory; Methodology; Knowledge systems; Semantic web technologies.</p