Semantic web learning technology design: addressing pedagogical challenges and precarious futures

Semantic web technologies have the potential to extend and transform teaching and learning, particularly in those educational settings in which learners are encouraged to engage with ‘authentic’ data from multiple sources. In the course of the ‘Ensemble’ project, teachers and learners in different disciplinary contexts in UK Higher Education worked with educational researchers and technologists to explore the potential of such technologies through participatory design and rapid prototyping. These activities exposed some of the barriers to the development and adoption of emergent learning technologies, but also highlighted the wide range of factors, not all of them technological or pedagogical, that might contribute to enthusiasm for and adoption of such technologies. This suggests that the scope and purpose of research and design activities may need to be broadened and the paper concludes with a discussion of how the tradition of operaismo or ‘workers’ enquiry’ may help to frame such activities. This is particularly relevant in a period when the both educational institutions and the working environments for which learners are being prepared are becoming increasingly fractured, and some measure of ‘precarity’ is increasingly the norm

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

Mobilities, moorings and boundary marking in developing semantic technologies in educational practices

While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the Ensemble research project, this article examines spatially some of the possibilities and constraints that arise in the introduction of semantic technologies into case-based learning in higher education. While the affordances of the semantic web provide a technological basis for the development of flexible tools and associated pedagogies in ways that could enhance case-based learning, there are many tensions in this process. In this article, we draw upon certain aspects of spatial theory to examine the ways in which the mobilities and openings made possible by the introduction of semantic technologies also entail mooring and boundary marking in order to give the technologies specifically educational purposes. We suggest how educational practices can be considered theoretically as spatial orderings and some of the implications

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts, and the Brain

Excerpts presentations and discussions from a May 2009 conference on the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, the arts, and learning -- the effects of early arts education on other aspects of cognition and implications for policy and practice

Genie: A Generator of Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands

To understand diverse natural language commands, virtual assistants today are trained with numerous labor-intensive, manually annotated sentences. This paper presents a methodology and the Genie toolkit that can handle new compound commands with significantly less manual effort. We advocate formalizing the capability of virtual assistants with a Virtual Assistant Programming Language (VAPL) and using a neural semantic parser to translate natural language into VAPL code. Genie needs only a small realistic set of input sentences for validating the neural model. Developers write templates to synthesize data; Genie uses crowdsourced paraphrases and data augmentation, along with the synthesized data, to train a semantic parser. We also propose design principles that make VAPL languages amenable to natural language translation. We apply these principles to revise ThingTalk, the language used by the Almond virtual assistant. We use Genie to build the first semantic parser that can support compound virtual assistants commands with unquoted free-form parameters. Genie achieves a 62% accuracy on realistic user inputs. We demonstrate Genie's generality by showing a 19% and 31% improvement over the previous state of the art on a music skill, aggregate functions, and access control.Comment: To appear in PLDI 201

The many faces and phases of the Semantic Spider

This paper tells a story about a hybrid object known as the ‘Semantic Spider’ that was born out of need to illustrate the concept of semantic web within Ensemble [1]; a diverse, interdisciplinary research and development project between education and computer sciences. The purpose of the project is to study case based learning across disciplines in higher education and to develop semantic web applications for supporting that learning. The semantic web is the concept of an internet where all data is stored in machine-readable formats [2], which offers many new possibilities in exploring and reasoning across heterogeneous data sources and types. What began as a simply-drawn diagram depicting the technological complexities required to achieve this vision, has evolved into a complex, multiple, unstable and continually evolving object. This diagram, known informally within the team as the ‘Semantic Spider’, plays multiple and varied roles within the team: it is being used by the team not only for operationalising aspects of the semantic web in their research and development, but also for enacting these activities in multi-disciplinary settings. It also acts as a thinking tool for the project members in making sense of the complex research settings and data, as well as with helping to theorize the design processes. The diagram is powerful in informing and engaging research participants in the work of the project, helping them to understand the complexities of the project work, and to envisage the possibilities offered by the technology, among others. The different versions of the Spider are designed purposefully for use in varied contexts, but these also evolve through chance discussions. As an object, it has no original but a lot of copies; it plays a varied role in work of the project, influencing and being influenced by the research activities. It is a conceptual-material-human hybrid. The project work is still on-going for another year. What happens to the Spider after the project is finished remains to be seen - will it be forgotten and become redundant, or will it become an object like Tim Berner-Lee's iconic Layer cake [3] which we started off with? In this paper we will first trace the different phases of the Spider, and account for how it has evolved and been constructed for different purposes and settings. We will then explore the different faces the Spider shows in order to work in different contexts. The story of this diagram exemplifies the multiple realities of a research project and its practices