Xml Beyond The Tags

XML is quickly being utilized in the field of technical communication to transfer information from database to person and company to company. Often communicators will structure information without a second thought of how or why certain tags are used to mark up the information. Because the company or a manual says to use those tags, the communicator does so. However, if professionals want to unlock the true potential of XML for better sharing of information across platforms, they need to understand the effects the technology using XML as well as political and cultural factors have on the tags being used. This thesis reviewed literature from multiple fields utilizing XML to find how tag choices can be influenced. XML allows for the sharing of information across multiple platforms and databases. Because of this efficiency, XML is utilized by many technologies. Often communicators must tag information so that the technologies can find the marked up information; therefore, technologies like single sourcing, data mining, and knowledge management influence the types of tags created. Additionally, cultural and political influences are analyzed to see how they play a role in determining what tags are used and created for specific documents. The thesis concludes with predictions on the future of XML and the technological, political, and cultural influences associated with XML tag sets based on information found within the thesis

Supporting learning object versioning

A current popular paradigm in e-learning is that of the "learning object". Broadly de-fined, a learning object is a reusable piece of educational material intended to be strung together with other learning objects to form larger educational units such as activities, lessons, or whole courses. This aggregating of learning objects together is a recursive process – small objects can be combined to form medium sized objects, medium sized objects can be combined to form large objects, and so on. Once objects have been com-bined appropriately, they are generally serialized into content packages, and deployed into an online course for delivery to learners.Learning objects are often stored in distributed and decentralized repositories throughout the Internet. This provides unique challenges when managing the history of such an ob-ject, as traditional versioning techniques (e.g. CVS, RCS, etc.) rely on centralized man-agement. These challenges have been largely ignored by the educational technology community, but are becoming more important as sharing of learning objects increases.This thesis explores these issues by providing a formal version model for learning ob-jects, a set of data bindings for this model, and a prototype authoring environment which implements these bindings. In addition, the work explores the potential benefits of ver-sion control by implementing a visualization of a learning object revision tree. This visualization includes the relationship between objects and their aggregates, the struc-tural history of an object, and the semantic changes that an object has undergone

A first exploration of an inductive analysis approach for detecting learning design patterns

Please cite as: Francis Brouns, Rob Koper, Jocelyn Manderveld, Jan van Bruggen, Peter Sloep, Peter van Rosmalen, Colin Tattersall and Hubert Vogten (2005). A first exploration of an inductive analysis approach for detecting learning design patterns. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (Advances in Learning Design. Special Issue, eds. Colin Tattersall, Rob Koper), 2005/03. ISSN:1365-893X [http://jime.open.ac.uk/2005/03]One way to develop effective online courses is the use of learning design patterns, since patterns capture successful solutions. Pedagogical patterns are commonly created by human cognitive processing in "writer's workshops". We explore two ideas; first whether IMS Learning Design is suitable for detecting patterns in existing courses and secondly whether the use of inductive analyses is a suitable approach. We expect patterns to occur in the method section of a learning design, because here the process of teaching and learning is defined. We provide some suggestions for inductive techniques that could be applied to existing learning designs in order to detect patterns and discuss how the patterns could be used to create new learning designs. None of the suggested approaches are validated yet, but are intended as input for the ongoing discussion on patterns

XML: aplicações e tecnologias associadas: 6th National Conference

This volume contains the papers presented at the Sixth Portuguese XML Conference, called XATA (XML, Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas), held in Évora, Portugal, 14-15 February, 2008. The conference followed on from a successful series held throughout Portugal in the last years: XATA2003 was held in Braga, XATA2004 was held in Porto, XATA2005 was held in Braga, XATA2006 was held in Portalegre and XATA2007 was held in Lisboa. Dued to research evaluation criteria that are being used to evaluate researchers and research centers national conferences are becoming deserted. Many did not manage to gather enough submissions to proceed in this scenario. XATA made it through. However with a large decrease in the number of submissions. In this edition a special meeting will join the steering committee with some interested attendees to discuss XATA's future: internationalization, conference model, ... We think XATA is important in the national context. It has succeeded in gathering and identifying a comunity that shares the same research interests and has promoted some colaborations. We want to keep "the wheel spinning"... This edition has its program distributed by first day's afternoon and next day's morning. This way we are facilitating travel arrangements and we will have one night to meet

A theory and model for the evolution of software services

Software services are subject to constant change and variation. To control service development, a service developer needs to know why a change was made, what are its implications and whether the change is complete. Typically, service clients do not perceive the upgraded service immediately. As a consequence, service-based applications may fail on the service client side due to changes carried out during a provider service upgrade. In order to manage changes in a meaningful and effective manner service clients must therefore be considered when service changes are introduced at the service provider's side. Otherwise such changes will most certainly result in severe application disruption. Eliminating spurious results and inconsistencies that may occur due to uncontrolled changes is therefore a necessary condition for the ability of services to evolve gracefully, ensure service stability, and handle variability in their behavior. Towards this goal, this work presents a model and a theoretical framework for the compatible evolution of services based on well-founded theories and techniques from a number of disparate fields.

A first exploration of an inductive analysis approach for detecting learning design patterns

Commentary on: Chapter 1: An Introduction to Learning Design. (Koper, 2005) Abstract: One way to develop effective online courses is the use of learning design patterns, since patterns capture successful solutions. Pedagogical patterns are commonly created by human cognitive processing in "writer's workshops". We explore two ideas; first whether IMS Learning Design is suitable for detecting patterns in existing courses and secondly whether the use of inductive analyses is a suitable approach. We expect patterns to occur in the method section of a learning design, because here the process of teaching and learning is defined. We provide some suggestions for inductive techniques that could be applied to existing learning designs in order to detect patterns and discuss how the patterns could be used to create new learning designs. None of the suggested approaches are validated yet, but are intended as input for the ongoing discussion on patterns. Editors: Colin Tattersall and Rob Koper

A theory and model for the evolution of software services.

Software services are subject to constant change and variation. To control service development, a service developer needs to know why a change was made, what are its implications and whether the change is complete. Typically, service clients do not perceive the upgraded service immediately. As a consequence, service-based applications may fail on the service client side due to changes carried out during a provider service upgrade. In order to manage changes in a meaningful and effective manner service clients must therefore be considered when service changes are introduced at the service provider's side. Otherwise such changes will most certainly result in severe application disruption. Eliminating spurious results and inconsistencies that may occur due to uncontrolled changes is therefore a necessary condition for the ability of services to evolve gracefully, ensure service stability, and handle variability in their behavior. Towards this goal, this work presents a model and a theoretical framework for the compatible evolution of services based on well-founded theories and techniques from a number of disparate fields.

Web structure mining of dynamic pages

Web structure mining in static web contents decreases the accuracy of mined outcomes and affects the quality of decision making activity. By structure mining in web hidden data, the accuracy ratio of mined outcomes can be improved, thus enhancing the reliability and quality of decision making activity. Data Mining is an automated or semi automated exploration and analysis of large volume of data in order to reveal meaningful patterns. The term web mining is the discovery and analysis of useful information from World Wide Web that helps web search engines to find high quality web pages and enhances web click stream analysis. One branch of web mining is web structure mining. The goal of which is to generate structural summary about the Web site and Web pages. Web structure mining tries to discover the link structure of the hyperlinks at the inter-document level. In recent years, Web link structure mining has been widely used to infer important information about Web pages. But a major part of the web is in hidden form, also called Deep Web or Hidden Web that refers to documents on the Web that are dynamic and not accessible by general search engines; most search engine spiders can access only publicly index able Web (or the visible Web). Most documents in the hidden Web, including pages hidden behind search forms, specialized databases, and dynamically generated Web pages, are not accessible by general Web mining applications. Dynamic content generation is used in modern web pages and user forms are used to get information from a particular user and stored in a database. The link structure lying in these forms can not be accessed during conventional mining procedures. To access these links, user forms are filled automatically by using a rule based framework which has robust ability to read a web page containing dynamic contents as activeX controls like input boxes, command buttons, combo boxes, etc. After reading these controls dummy values are filled in the available fields and the doGet or doPost methods are automatically executed to acquire the link of next subsequent web page. The accuracy ratio of web page hierarchical structures can phenomenally be improved by including these hidden web pages in the process of Web structure mining. The designed system framework is adequately strong to process the dynamic Web pages along with static ones