Semantic Mediation as a Gateway to Interoperability, with a Case Study of the International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN)

Basic research on semantic interoperability is just beginning to address support for spatial data and information. This is clearly important for data portals containing geographic information system (GIS) layers, as well as supplemental information, often with cartographic and decision support tools. Agreements on content/semantic interoperability of these resources can help to eliminate the problems of meaning, making searches between disparate, but mutually beneficial, projects feasible. In recent years significant momentum has occurred in the development of Internet resources for coastal environments, where 2.2 billion people live within a 100 km range. A key aspect of this trend has been the development of coastal web atlases, based on web-enabled GIS. However, current inventories within coastal atlases are insufficient for the purposes of networking between them. Each atlas has different classifications of data and information (e.g., critical information on coastal erosion that may be needed across a broad geographic region as supplied by several different atlases). New semantic web tools and evolvement of standard metadata descriptions and interfaces are opening a road to interoperate within atlases. This paper presents a new semantic mediation approach using ontologies and Open Geospatial Consortium standard interfaces.This is an author's manuscript version. The final version as presented can be found at: http://marinemetadata.org/community/publications/icangisci08Keywords: Coastal web atlases, Semantic mediation, International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN), Coastal erosion, Geographic Information System (GIS

Syntactic and Semantic Interoperability Among Hydrologic Models

Development of integrated hydrologic models requires coupling of multidisciplinary, independent models and collaboration between different scientific communities. Component-based modeling provides an approach for the integration of models from different disciplines. A key advantage of component-based modeling is that it allows components to be created, tested, reused, extended, and maintained by a large group of model developers and end users. One significant challenge that must be addressed in creating an integrated hydrologic model using a component-based approach is enhancing the interoperability of components between different modeling communities and frameworks. The major goal of this work is to advance the integration of water related model components coming from different disciplines using the information underlying these models. This is achieved through addressing three specific research objectives. The first objective is to investigate the ability of component-based architecture to simulate feedback loops between hydrologic model components that share a boundary condition, and how data is transfered between temporally misaligned model components. The second objective is to promote the interoperability of components across water-related disciplinary boundaries and modeling frameworks by establishing an ontology for components\u27 metadata. The third study objective is to develop a domain-level ontology for defining hydrologic processes

Modélisation probabiliste du style d'apprentissage et application à l'adaptation de contenus pédagogiques indexés par une ontologie

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre général des systèmes d'enseignement adaptatifs. La problématique traitée est l'adaptation de l'activité pédagogique au mode d'apprentissage préféré de l'élève. Les travaux réalisés ont eu pour objectifs de : modéliser les préférences d'apprentissage de l'élève ; modéliser les contenus pédagogiques du domaine à enseigner ; proposer une stratégie d'adaptation qui rapproche les préférences des contenus afin de proposer une méthode pédagogique appropriée. Pour atteindre le premier objectif, la thèse étudie le style d'apprentissage de Felder. Une étude empirique pour établir un modèle de dépendance entre style, pédagogie, et comportement de l'élève a été réalisée. Les résultats ont permis d'établir un modèle de préférences probabiliste. Une méthode en deux étapes pour apprendre ce odèle puis le renforcer est développée. Deux implantations sont proposées : un réseau bayésien et une machine à vecteurs de support. Le contenu quant à lui est modélisé en utilisant une ontologie combinant le domaine, la pédagogie, ainsi que les ressources physiques. Une stratégie d'adaptation structurée sur quatre dimensions est présentée. Celle-ci consiste à rechercher dans le contenu la séquence pédagogique sémantiquement pertinente pour les préférences de l'élève. La recherche s'appuie sur une mesure de similarité sémantique qui est établie. Ce travail a eu un impact sur deux projets européens. En effet, la méthode de production et structuration des contenus, basée sur SCORM, qui est proposée a servi pour le projet UP2UML. L'approche de modélisation de l'élève sert aux recherches sur le profilage dans le projet KPLAB. ABSTRACT : This thesis deals with adaptive teaching systems. The research question is how to adapt pedagogical activities to the prefered learning mode of a student. The scientific objectives are: modelisation of student's learning preferences ; modelisation of adaptive learning contents of a given domain ; establishing an adaptation strategy that maps preferences to contents in order to recommend an appropriate teaching method In order to reach the first objective, the thesis studies the learning style of Felder. An empirical study to derive a dependency model between the style, the pedagogy, and the student behaviour has been conducted. Results led to creating a probabilistic preference model. A two-stage method to learn and reinforce the model is developed. Two implementations are proposed: a bayesian network and an SVM classifier. The content is represented using an ontology that combines the domain, the pedagogy, and the physical resources. An adaptation strategy centered around four dimensions is presented. This consists of searching the content to retrieve the most semantically pertinent pedagogical sequence given the student preferences. The search implements an original semantic similarity measure. This work significantly impacted two European research projects. The production and structuration method designed in this thesis and based on SCORM has been applied in the Leonardo Da Vinci project called UP2UML. The student modeling approche serves currently our research on user profiling in the KPLAB projec