A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

The business process modelling ontology

In this paper we describe the Business Process Modelling Ontology (BPMO), which is part of an approach to modelling business processes at the semantic level, integrating knowledge about the organisational context, workflow activities and Semantic Web Services. We harness knowledge representation and reasoning techniques so that business process workflows can: be exposed and shared through semantic descriptions; refer to semantically annotated data and services; incorporate heterogeneous data though semantic mappings; and be queried using a reasoner or inference engine. In this paper we describe our approach and evaluate BPMO through a use case

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Geospatial data integration with Semantic Web services: the eMerges approach

Geographic space still lacks the semantics allowing a unified view of spatial data. Indeed, as a unique but all encompassing domain, it presents specificities that geospatial applications are still unable to handle. Moreover, to be useful, new spatial applications need to match human cognitive abilities of spatial representation and reasoning. In this context, eMerges, an approach to geospatial data integration based on Semantic Web Services (SWS), allows the unified representation and manipulation of heterogeneous spatial data sources. eMerges provides this integration by mediating legacy spatial data sources to high-level spatial ontologies through SWS and by presenting for each object context dependent affordances. This generic approach is applied here in the context of an emergency management use case developed in collaboration with emergency planners of public agencies

Cloud service localisation

The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales. We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way

Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the web of data

Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles

Mediation of semantic web services in IRS-III

Business applications composed of heterogeneous distributed components or Web services need mediation to resolve data and process mismatches at runtime. This paper describes mediation in IRS-III, a framework and platform for developing WSMO-based Semantic Web Services. We present our approach to mediation within Semantic Web Services and highlight the role of WSMO mediator types when solving mismatches at the semantic level between a service requester and a service provider. We describe the components of our mediation framework and how it can handle data, goal and process mediation during the activities of selection, composition and invocation of Semantic Web Services

Translation as a mediating activity: the influence of translation metaphors in research, practise and training of community interpreting

Entre las metáforas que muchos autores han utilizado para describir la traducción está la de la mediación. Una ojeada a la bibliografía publicada en las últimas décadas sobre interpretación en los servicios públicos nos permite comprobar hasta qué punto esa visión del intérprete como mediador está presente en muchas de las obras escritas al respecto. La idea de que el papel del intérprete no se reduce únicamente a la de reproductor de enunciados lingüísticos se halla latente en muchos de ellos. En este artículo, pretendemos analizar la influencia de esta metáfora de la mediación en las propuestas realizadas por los investigadores de este ámbito y comprobar cuál ha sido su repercusión en la investigación, la práctica y la docencia.G.I. HUM 767 (ayudas a Grupos de Investigación de la Junta de Andalucía) / Editorial Comares (colección interlingua