Experiences with Designing a Team Project Module for Teaching Teamwork to Students

Team projects play an important role in the education of engineers. This paper describes a team project module (called Team project) that is part of a postgraduate course in Informatics. Its main objective is to give students a hands-on experience with different aspects of working in team on a problem. We discuss several aspects that should be considered in designing such module as a part of a curriculum: team formation, team communication, team assessment, problem statement and assignment, development proc-ess and team supervision. We outline several different alternatives, analyse their pros and cons and de-scribe our approach and related experiences

Social Navigation for Semantic Web Applications Using Space Maps

In this paper we deal with personalized navigation in an open information space. Our aim is to support effective orientation in increasing amount of information accessible through the Web. We present a method for personalized navigation based on social navigation where the information space is represented by an ontology. Navigational information is obtained by following user footsteps. It is attached to information fragment mapped to the user goal and to description of this goal using an ontology. This information is used later to show the way to similar goals. We use ontology representation of the information space that supports the effective navigation and the navigational ability to deal with frequent changes of information content in open environments. We demonstrate the proposed method in the context of developed software tool PENA for personalized navigation support in labor supply domain

Comparing Instances of Ontological Concepts for Personalized Recommendation in Large Information Spaces

We present a novel method for instance comparison of ontological concepts with regard to personalized content presentation and/or navigation in large information spaces. We assume that comparing properties of documents which users found interesting leads to discovery of information about users' interests specifically when considering Semantic Web applications where documents or their parts are represented by ontological concepts. We employ the ontology structure and different similarity metrics for datatype and object properties and investigate reasons behind user interest in the presented content. Moreover, we propose and evaluate an approach to instance similarity computation for a particular user while also considering the user's individual preferences

Automatic Dynamic Web Service Composition: A Survey and Problem Formalization

The aim of Web service composition is to arrange multiple services into workflows supplying complex user needs. Due to the huge amount of Web services and the need to supply dynamically varying user goals, it is necessary to perform the composition automatically. The objective of this article is to overview the issues of automatic dynamic Web service composition. We discuss the issues related to the semantics of services, which is important for automatic Web service composition. We propose a problem formalization contributing to the formal definition of the pre-/post-conditions, with possible value restrictions, and their relation to the semantics of services. We also provide an overview of several existing approaches dealing with the problem of Web service composition and discuss the current achievements in the field and depict some open research areas

Report on the 6th ADBIS’2002 conference

The 6th East European Conference ADBIS 2002 was held on September~8--11, 2002 in Bratislava, Slovakia. It was organised by the Slovak University of Technology (and, in particular, its Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology) in Bratislava in co-operation with the ACM SIGMOD, the Moscow ACM SIGMOD Chapter, and Slovak Society for Computer Science. The call for papers attracted 115 submissions from 35~countries. The international program committee, consisting of 43 researchers from 21 countries, selected 25 full papers and 4 short papers for a monograph volume published by the Springer Verlag. Beside those 29 regular papers, the volume includes also 3 invited papers presented at the Conference as invited lectures. Additionally, 20 papers have been selected for the Research communications volume. The authors of accepted papers come from 22~countries of 4 continents, indicating the truly international recognition of the ADBIS conference series. The conference had 104 registered participants from 22~countries and included invited lectures, tutorials, and regular sessions. This report describes the goals of the conference and summarizes the issues discussed during the sessions

Rule-based User Characteristics Acquisition from Logs with Semantics for Personalized Web-Based Systems

Personalization of web-based information systems based on specialized user models has become more important in order to preserve the effectiveness of their use as the amount of available content increases. We describe a user modeling approach based on automated acquisition of user behaviour and its successive rule-based evaluation and transformation into an ontological user model. We stress reusability and flexibility by introducing a novel approach to logging, which preserves the semantics of logged events. The successive analysis is driven by specialized rules, which map usage patterns to knowledge about users, stored in an ontology-based user model. We evaluate our approach via a case study using an enhanced faceted browser, which provides personalized navigation support and recommendation

Towards Computerized Adaptive Assessment Based on Structured Tasks

Tvarožek, J., Kravčík, M., & Bieliková, M. (2008). Towards Computerized Adaptive Assessment Based on Structured Tasks. In W. Nejdl et al. (Eds.), Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (pp. 224-234). Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.In an attempt to support traditional classroom assessment processes with fully computerized methods, we have developed a method for adaptive assessment suitable for well structured domains with high emphasis on problem solving and capable of robust continuous assessment, potentially encouraging student’s achievements, reflective thinking, and creativity. The method selects problems according to the student’s demonstrated ability, structured task description schemes allow for a detailed analysis of student’s errors, and on-demand generation of task instances facilitates independent student work. We evaluated the proposed method using a software system we had developed in the domain of middle school mathematics.This work was partially supported by the Cultural and Educational Grant Agency of the Slovak Republic, grant No. KEGA 3/5187/07 and the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. [http://www.tencompetence.org

Enhancing Semantic Web Services Composition with User Interaction

The semantic web services composition process arranges several web services into one composite to realize complex workflows. To do this, semantic metadata of web services’ description are used. The current approaches based mainly on AI planning are immature to be used in practice. In this paper we propose an approach involving users in the semantic web services composition to help overcome problems occurring in the composition process. The basic idea is to find the users helpful in situations when preconditions are not satisfied or some input data are not available which are in demand to create a composition.

ALEF: A framework for adaptive webbased learning 2.0,

Abstract. State-of-the-art learning management systems provide their stakeholders with many features coming from Web 2.0 paradigm, but often ignore the need for personalization and adaptation during the learning. More, learning activities are often fragmented -a student needs to make a decision whether he or she wants to take questions or read explanatory materials. In addition, majority of current solutions do not provide a truly interactive environment, where students are allowed to participate in content creation and maintenance. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing and developing a framework for Adaptive Web-based Learning 2.0. We describe basic requirements for such a framework and provide an overview of all its important underlying models and functionality