The work of the cluster has
progressed during the reporting period with the following outcomes:
·
Three new partners have joined the cluster: the
University of Glamorgan, UK, Imperial College, London and the Athens University
of Economics and Business.
·
In Task 5.1, the 9th Delos Thematic workshop
on Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services was held
in Heraklion, Crete on 11-13 May 2005.
·
The Digital Repositories Report (D5.1.1) has been
delayed due to staff ill health and conflicting core funder (JISC) commitments
at UKOLN. It is now rescheduled and due
June 2006.
·
Six internal deliverable reports (on Interoperability framework and architecture,
Semantic mapping between SCORM and
MPEG7 concepts, Investigation
of content packaging options, Personalization, Learning Styles, and Instructional ontology) have been
produced relating to aspects of interoperability between Digital Libraries and
e-Learning applications.
·
The GraphOnto tool has been identified as a key
integration element for the KESI cluster and for the wider task activities of
the Delos network.
·
In Task 5.5, the CIDOC-CRM / FRBR Harmonisation work
has produced a core ontology and draft detailed model.
·
Work has begun on the mappings and preparatory
modelling for the cultural heritage demonstrator.
·
A total of 30 published papers and invited
(high-profile) international conference presentations have been produced. The
cluster work has been promoted in the US.
·
A The strategy for JPA3 proposal has been prepared
and submitted to the Scientific Board based on extending the Ontology-driven
Interoperability work.activity has been largely to build on existing work.
This report aims to summarise and
synthesise the progress during the second Joint Programme of Activities (JPA2)
to date (January 2005-february 2006) of the Knowledge Extraction and Semantic
Interoperability (KESI) cluster.
Currently,
the KESI cluster has the following goals for JPA2:
(i)
To complete foundation work carried out during the first 12
months, describing the state-of-the art in the three task areas of information
repositories, knowledge extraction and semantic interoperability
(ii)
To develop prototypes which demonstrate the application of
data models, metadata standards, metadata schema profiles and schema mappings
for enhanced semantic interoperability
(iii)
To work in the domains of e-Learning and cultural heritage to
inform the user requirements, design, testing and evaluation of the prototype
systems.
Whilst providing current factual
descriptions of the activity underway in each of the three Task areas in JPA2
(Information Repositories and Open Archives, e-Learning and Digital Libraries,
Ontology-driven Interoperability), the report also aims to be reflective and
critical in approach. Within the scope of the KESI cluster, it attempts to
address some of the relevant emergent issues both in the European context and
in the wider Digital Library (DL) environment but also within the Delos Network
itself. These include dissemination and practical take-up of KESI work,
promoting links between Delos activity and other global DL initiatives and
facilitating intra- and inter-cluster integration. An indication is also given
of preliminary plans for work during JPA3.
The Report is
structured with a section on each of the three Task areas followed by sections
on Management, Dissemination and Outreach, Intra- and Inter-cluster
integration, JPA3 plans and finally, some Conclusions are presented. There is
also an Executive Summary.
This task T5.1 has been carried
forward from JPA1. It has the objective of delivering a “Digital Repositories
Forum” which will support discussion of particular topics which will contribute
to an evaluative study on the development and implementation of community repositories to support research
(institutional, national, e-prints, subject/disciplinary, species, scientific
and other e-data) and learning & teaching (institutional, national learning
objects and other materials). The study will also be informed by a Thematic
Workshop. The Task Leader is UKOLN with partners including Southampton,
Imperial, FORTH and TUC
(See Partners section 10)..
Through the KESI cluster
partner University of Southampton, Delos sponsored the Berlin 3 Open Access
conference 28th February- 1st March 2005 : Progress in
Implementing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences
and Humanities. More details of the programme, international speakers and
participants can be found at http://www.eprints.org/events/berlin3/index.html.
The highlight in 2005 from this
Task was the 9th Delos Thematic workshop on Digital
Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services held in Heraklion, Crete on 11-13 May 2005.
This Workshop was planned and organised by UKOLN jointly with the Preservation
cluster with a joint Programme Committee. The keynote was given by Sandy
Payette, Co-Director Fedora Project, Cornell University, USA “Rethinking
the role of repositories in scholarly communication” with submitted
research papers and breakout groups contributing to Forum discussion. The
Proceedings have been published and are available on the cluster Web site http://delos-wp5.ukoln.ac.uk/ which is
linked to the Delos site. Details of individual papers are given in Section
6.1. The Workshop was attended by 33 delegates from a wide range of
institutions (including from two national libraries), different backgrounds
(including from the UK National eScience Centre and Poznan SuperComputing
Centre) and nations, including two US representatives from the California
Digital Library.
Work has also
begun on the Report (D5.1.1) associated with this Task but it has been delayed
for reasons stated in the Periodic Management Report provided to the Commission.
One of the reasons for the delay has been the launch of the new £4M Digital
Repository programme (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories)
funded by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), who are one of the
core funders of UKOLN. In this role, UKOLN took responsibility for hosting and
providing programme support for the projects and this has had a significant
adverse impact on effort available to complete this Report. However this has
been addressed, and the current position is that a Revised Table of Contents
has been agreed (see below), existing contributions will be updated and the
report is now due in June (Month 30).
Table 1. D5.1.1 Revised Table of
Contents (February 2006)
|
Section
|
Title
|
Contributors
|
Status
|
|
1
|
Introduction (typology,
characteristics, publishing context)
|
UKOLN
|
|
|
2
|
Infrastructure &
architectures (SOA context and DR applications)
|
UKOLN, Southampton, Imperial
|
|
|
3
|
Relation to scholarly
knowledge cycle/research cycle
|
UKOLN, FORTH
|
|
|
4
|
e-Learning repositories
|
TUC
|
|
|
5
|
Multimedia repositories
|
Imperial, Southampton
|
Needs update
|
|
6
|
Access, Use and Semantic
Interoperability
|
FORTH, UKOLN,
|
Needs update
|
|
7
|
Summary and Recommendations
|
UKOLN
|
|
This major
new JISC initiative is highly significant in many ways: it will provide and
indeed is already providing, a wealth of information and experience which will
inform the content of the Task Report, it signals the degree of perceived
importance attached to the development of digital repositories within the
education sector in the UK and it has influenced the development of a new
European DL proposal Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European
Research (DRIVER), which aims to develop and deliver an infrastructure of
networked repositories in Europe, and includes some KESI cluster partners.
There is much
related research and development underway at UKOLN and Southampton (see
Publications and Presentations Section 6.1), and the final report has the
potential to be influential both in Europe and beyond, given the high levels of
interest and investment in this field.
Task 5.4 is exploring the interoperability
of e-Learning applications and Digital Libraries looking particularly at data
models, standards and workflow. The aim is to study the major standards for
e-Learning (e.g. SCORM) and audio-visual (A/V) content description (e.g. MPEG7
etc.), produce mappings and following this analysis, develop an integration
framework or architecture and build a demonstrator based on this architecture.
The demonstrator will be tested on different classes of users: Digital Library
users and distance learners. The Task leader is TUC with partners Ionian
University and UKOLN.
The Task has sought to answer the
following questions:
·
What are the major architectural requirements and
workflows for effectively supporting eLearning applications running over
digital libraries?
·
What are the major interoperability requirements for DL
and eLearning standards?
·
What are the management requirements and tools for
audiovisual material and 3D object representations, which form the basis for
many collections of learning resources?
The task is focussing on the
design and implementation of appropriate tools which can be deployed across the
wider DL practitioner community. Initial work has addressed developing models
for an architectural framework and for workflow, producing mappings and
transformations between relevant metadata standards, implementing the GraphOnto
tool, implementing aspects of the architecture and documenting the issues
in a series of reports.
A number of Internal Deliverables
have been written covering the objectives of the task, achieving better
collaboration between the partners, better organization and flexibility. These
Reports are available in the private area of the cluster Web site at http://delos-wp5.ukoln.ac.uk/ (username: private, password: D3l0s-WP5)
·
Interoperability
framework and architecture: In this deliverable from TUC, an
interoperability framework and a corresponding architecture is presented for
the integration of eLearning applications on top of digital libraries. See
Section 4.1.1.
·
Semantic
mapping between SCORM and MPEG7 concepts: the major eLearning and
audiovisual standards are studied and a mapping between them is presented by IU
and TUC. To illustrate the equivalence between the two models, an ontology is
being developed and coded in OWL.
·
Investigation
of content packaging options – Final model for the storage of audiovisual
objects along with educational information Content packaging: In
this deliverable from UKOLN and TUC, the major content packaging schemes are
studied and a framework for the storage of audiovisual objects along with
educational information in the digital library part and also for their delivery
to the eLearning applications according to the architecture is developed. See
Section 4.1.1.
·
Personalization:
A study of existing models for the representation of Learner Profiles (e.g.
IEEE LIP, PAPI and ELENA Project) has been completed by UKOLN and a Learner
Information Model (LIM) is proposed. See Section 4.1.3.
·
Learning Styles:
In this deliverable produced by IU and TUC, several existing approaches of
categorization of learning styles are studied.
·
Instructional
ontology: In this deliverable a workflow model for the construction
of abstract training scenarios (learning designs) represented in an
instructional ontology (OWL) is presented by TUC, according to the
interoperability framework proposed. This allows reusability of the learning
designs and provision of real personalized learning experiences: learning
objects are bound to the learning experience on run-time, according to the
needs of the learner expressed in the learner profile. See Section 4.1.2
This Task is also working to extend GraphOnto, which is an interactive ontology editor and ontology
mappings tool for OWL. GraphOnto which has been developed by TUC, is
used in several DELOS tasks (T3.6, T3.9, T3.10, T3.11, T5.4 and T5.5) and is
offered through the DELOS demonstrators and testbeds Web site: http://astral.ced.tuc.gr/delos/
(Universities outside DELOS have also obtained it). The tool is being extended
to provide full ontology mappings and query mappings. Wider use of the tool
will clearly be advantageous to integration efforts across the DELOS network
(see Section 8 Integration).
In associated work, models for supporting semantic 3D information
to be used in a variety of eScience applications have been derived and
functionality requirements investigated. Two ontologies for 3D scenes, based on
formal and de facto standards have been developed. They are available on
DELOS WP3 testbeds and demonstrators site for downloading: http://astral.ced.tuc.gr/delos/. This
work is described in a paper from TUC that has been accepted in the IEEE
Virtual Reality international conference (see Publications Section 6.1). This
work is complementary to the work in the Task 3.8 “Description, matching and
retrieval by content of 3D objects”, which does not consider semantic
descriptions.
Additional successfully-funded research proposals have developed from
the Task activities. These include:
·
An IU, TUC
proposal to the Greek National Educational Radio-Television (ERT) has
been approved for using selected material for the provision of eLearning
experiences to schools. A rich catalogue with available audio and/or
audiovisual material has been organized and an investigation of material for
e-learning suitable to the age of the pupils in an audiovisual form has been
done. A part of this material will be used in our demonstration architecture.
·
An IST EU
STREP Project (LOGOS) has been approved, starting in February 2006,
based on the architectural concepts developed in this task.
Work is continuing on the
demonstrator Deliverable D5.4.2 which is due month 30: details of Task
dissemination are presented in Section 6.
In the next sections, some of the
main achievements of T5.4 are presented. Detailed information can be found in
the internal deliverables in the private area of the cluster Web site at http://delos-wp5.ukoln.ac.uk/ (username: private, password: D3l0s-WP5).
4.1.1
Interoperability
framework and architecture
Digital Libraries are an important source
for the provision of eLearning resources (McLean, 2004). However, digital library metadata
standards and eLearning metadata standards have been developing independently,
presenting interoperability issues between digital libraries and eLearning
applications. This is a complex and multi-level problem, which can be
seen as a stack of conceptual layers where each one is built on top of the
previous one (left part of Figure
1): There are different data representations, objects,
concepts, domains, contexts and metacontexts in the layer stack that should be
efficiently managed in a standard way.
Metadata models are languages that are used to represent the knowledge
in a particular application area. Each metadata model is shown as a vertical
bar on this stack to cover a specific region that represents the parts that the
model tries to capture and describe in a standard way. If one places different
metadata models besides this stack, he may identify gaps and intersection
regions so that being apparent where the interoperability problems among these
models occur.
The
right part of Figure 1 shows such a picture in the case of MPEG7 (MPEG7,
2001, 2003) and SCORM (SCORM, 2004), the major metadata standards in the
audiovisual and eLearning domains respectively. It is apparent from this
graphical presentation that MPEG7 and SCORM are not completely overlapping
meaning that we need additional models to provide interoperability mechanisms
between them. Of course, interoperability problems exist also in the overlapping
areas. But in these areas solving the problem of interoperability is easier and
can be solved with standard methods (e.g. by means of mappings). The major
problems arise in the areas with no overlaps between the two metadata
standards.
Figure 1.
The multilevel problem of interoperability
A digital object can be
described in many ways and delivered to many applications as illustrated in the
upper part of Figure 2. However, performing just a transformation between
the source and target metadata schemes is not always a panacea. As shown in Figure 1, standards do not always completely overlap. In the
non-overlapping areas the interoperability problem cannot be simply solved
using mappings.
Figure 2.
Using METS to support multiple-contexts views of digital objects
For example, SCORM contains
an educational part that cannot be mapped to MPEG7 elements. Very often we want
A/V digital objects that reside in a digital library and are described with
MPEG7 to be used in eLearning applications. However, the MPEG7 descriptions do
not say anything about the educational use (e.g. learning objectives) of the
digital objects. On the other hand, MPEG7 offers a comprehensive set of
audiovisual Description Tools, which can not be represented in SCORM. In order
to overcome these shortcomings we have to use a higher level metadata model
that is able to encapsulate both SCORM and MPEG7 metadata descriptions in the
context of a digital library. This model should be essentially a wrapper that
will allow for the use of MPEG7 metadata of existing A/V objects and parts of
them together with the necessary LOM (IEEE LOM, 2002) metadata to specify the
educational characteristics of these objects and their parts.
In general, we need a way
to have multiple descriptions (source metadata (domain), target metadata (context)
pairs) for a digital object showing possible views of the object. Context and
domain information should reside in different levels, where context information
is described using domain information.
A flexible model that
satisfies the above needs is the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
(METS) (METS, 2005). METS is a widely-accepted standard designed specifically
for digital library metadata. METS is a flexible, but tightly structured,
container for all metadata necessary to describe, navigate and maintain a
digital object: Descriptive, Administrative and Structural metadata. Each type
of metadata is described in a separate section, which is linked to its
counterparts by internal identifiers. These metadata (any preferred scheme) may
be held physically within the METS file, or in external files and referenced
from within the METS document.
Figure 3.
Combining METS, LOM and MPEG7 to build audiovisual learning objects
Using METS we can create
different views of a digital object pointing to both source metadata description
and target metadata description (context) in different levels. The methodology
is illustrated in the lower part of Figure
2. Using the DMDID attribute of the <div>
elements (structMap section describing the structure of the digital object) we
can point to an appropriate metadata scheme creating a context (view) of this
object and its parts. E.g., we can use LOM to describe the educational characteristics
of each object and its parts, so that being able for them to be searched and
retrieved by eLearning applications (learning context) (Figure 3). In parallel, using the DMDID attribute of the
<file> elements (fileSec section, where all files comprising this digital
object are listed, we can point to a source metadata scheme that describes the
low features or the semantics of this object (e.g. using MPEG7).
The ASIDE
architecture: An Architecture for Supporting Interoperability
between Digital Libraries and ELearning Applications
The architecture presented here
addresses the identified interoperability problems in a layered architecture
where eLearning (and other) applications are built on top of digital libraries
and utilize their content. The ASIDE architecture offers a generic framework
for the automatic creation of personalized learning experiences using reusable
A/V learning objects. It is service-oriented and conforms to the IMS Digital
Repositories Interoperability (IMS DRI) Specification (IMS DRI, 2003). The IMS
DRI specification provides recommendations for the interoperation of the most
common repository functions enabling diverse components to communicate with one
another: search/expose, submit/store, gather/expose and request/deliver. These
functions should be implementable across services to enable them to present a
common interface. Figure 4 illustrates the architecture components, which are
the following:
Figure 4.
The interoperability architecture
·
The Digital
Library, where digital objects are described using METS+LOM (eLearning context),
and MPEG7 (A/V descriptions) building this way interoperable A/V learning
objects, which can be transformed to SCORM and delivered to eLearning applications
(METS/SCORM transformation component). Some important elements used in the LOM
descriptions are: educational objectives expressed as {verb (Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom
& Krathwohl, 1965))+subject (term from a Domain Ontology)} using the
classification part of LOM, context, typicalAgeRange and difficulty.
Regarding the MPEG7 descriptions, the methodology described in (Tsinaraki,
Polydoros & Christodoulakis, 2004) is used for extending MPEG7 with
domain-specific knowledge descriptions expressed in OWL (OWL, 2004)(domain
ontologies).
·
Applications
(Software Agents in terms of IMS DRI, like Learning Content Management Systems,
Learning Management Systems etc.) that discover, access and use the content of
the A/V content of the digital library through appropriate services (resource
utilizers). The generated personalized A/V learning experiences are delivered
to the applications in the form of SCORM packages. Any SCORM-compliant system
can recognize and “play” these packages.
·
The Middleware,
which is responsible for the assembly of personalized learning experiences. The
middleware consists of the following parts:
o
The METS/SCORM
transformation component, which is responsible for the transformation of
the METS descriptions pointing to LOM and MPEG7 descriptions to SCORM Content
Packages (SCORM, 2004). This includes not only simple transformation from METS
XML file to SCORM manifest file, but also the construction of the whole SCORM
package (PIF). Moreover, the mime-type of the files is taken into account and,
if needed, intermediate html pages are constructed with links to these files
(e.g. in case of video files).
o
The Personalized
Learning Experiences Assembler (PALEA), which, taking into account the
knowledge provided by the Learning Designs (abstract training scenarios) and
the Learner Profiles described later, constructs the personalized learning
experiences and delivers them in the form of IMS Content Packages. Before
transforming the resulted learning experience to a SCORM package, it is stored
as METS+LOM+MPEG7 description in the digital library according to the
interoperability framework, being ready and available in an interoperable way
for later requests. The dashed arrow in the left side of PALEA indicates that
using this component is optional, and that digital library services can be
directly accessed (e.g. a teacher wants to find appropriate learning objects to
construct manually a learning experience).
·
Ontologies
providing knowledge to the PALEA for the automatic construction of personalized
learning experiences:
o
Domain
Ontologies that provide vocabularies about concepts within a domain and
their relationships.
o
Instructional
Ontology (see section 4.1.2) that provides a model for the construction of
abstract training scenarios. These are pedagogical approaches (instructional
strategies/didactical templates), which can be applied to the construction of
learning experiences.
·
Learning Designs
are abstract training scenarios in a certain domain built according to the
model given in the instructional ontology.
·
The Learner
Profiles constructed using the vocabulary given in the Learner Profile Ontology, which represents a learner model for the
creation of learner profiles. Elements from IEEE PAPI (IEEE PAPI, 2002) and IMS
LIP (IMS LIP, 2005) specifications have been also used in this model. Some important
elements of this model are: learner goals, competencies, previous knowledge,
educational level and learning style.
The interoperability architecture
is being implemented using the following technologies: Web services, JavaTM 2
Platform, Standard Edition, v1.5, Berkeley DB XML, Jena API, SPARQL RDF Query
Language (Prud'hommeaux & Seaborne, 2005) and XQuery for querying the
XML-based metadata descriptions of the digital objects stored in the digital
library.
Nowadays, the need for
e-learning systems supporting a rich set of pedagogical requirements has been
identified as an important issue in the field of distance learning (Capuano et
al., 2005). Several initiatives take place in order to meet this need. The most
important of these initiatives seems to be IMS Learning Design (IMS LD, 2003)
that provides a framework to depict pedagogies.
IMS Learning Design
specification (IMS LD, 2003) is a development of the Educational Modelling
Language (Hummel, Manderveld, Tattersall & Koper, 2004) (designed by the
Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) to enable flexible representation of
the elements within online courses; not just the materials but also the order
in which activities take place, the roles that people undertake, key criteria
for progression, and the services needed for presentation to learners. The
learning design specification does not detail how the course material itself is
represented but rather how to package up the overall information into a
structure that is modelled on a play, with acts, roles (actors) and resources.
The IMS Learning Design
specification supports the use of a wide range of pedagogies in online
learning. Rather than attempting to capture the specifics of many pedagogies,
it does this by providing a generic and flexible language. This language is
designed to enable many different pedagogies to be expressed. It allows
different pedagogical approaches to be integrated into a single ‘learning
design’ where different approaches may be appropriate for different types of
learners. The approach has the advantage over alternatives in that only one set
of learning design and runtime tools then need to be implemented in order to
support the desired wide range of pedagogies.
The IMS Learning Design
specifications (Figure
5) are structured in three levels. Level A includes
activities, roles and environments. Activities (learning activities or support
activities) can be grouped into activities structures and executed into
specific environments. An environment is formed by learning objects and
services provided to users during activity execution. Users are classified into
roles (learners, teachers, tutors, etc.). Nowadays, learning objects are
educational contents by which learners acquire knowledge and services are
functionalities invoked during learning process in order to communicate with
tutors or other learners. Level B adds properties (storing information about a
single person or a group) and conditions (setting constraints upon the flow of
activities) to the first level. Level C adds notifications (mechanism to handle
messages passing between users) to the framework.
Figure 5.
Conceptual model for overall IMS Learning Design (from IMS LD, 2003)
However, although IMS-LD
provides a model to personalize the learning experience at run-time using
properties and conditions at Level B, the instructional planner has to provide
specific learning objects and services, so that learning objects and services
are bound to the learning design scenario on design time. This prohibits the
construction of “real” personalized learning experiences, where the appropriate
learning object according to the learner profile are bound to the decided
learning experience on run-time.
The model proposed in this work
for the construction of abstract training scenarios and represented in an instructional ontology coded in OWL (Figure 6) has the important characteristic that learning
objects are not bound in the training scenarios on design time. Instead of
that, the pedagogy is separated and independent from the content achieving this
way reusability and interoperability of learning designs that can be used fron
the systems as are, or parts of them for the construction of “real”
personalized learning experiences. The term “real” is emphasized here, to
indicate that to provide personalized learning experiences, the learner profile
should not only affect the selection of a sequence or structure of activities
comprising a training scenario that satisfy his/her learning needs (learning
objectives, learning style, age, educational level etc.), but also the
retrieval of learning objects that are appropriate for him/her. An intelligent
component/system (as the Personalized Learning Experiences Assembler (PALEA) in
the ASIDE architecture can match the knowledge given in the learner profiles
and the learning designs in order to build firstly an appropriate activity
structure or sequence for the specific learner (learning experience structure
or training scenario) and afterwards selecting appropriate learning objects
from a digital library for each node (activity) of this structure. This is
possible, since the model proposed in the instructional ontology gives the
opportunity to specify in each Activity the learning objects’ requirements,
instead of binding the learning objects themselves, as IMS Learning Design (IMS
LD, 2003) imposes. This ontology borrows some elements and ideas from the IMS
Learning Design Specification and LOM and its purpose is to overcome the
limitations that current eLearning standards and specifications impose. In the
ASIDE architecture the final decided learning experiences along with the
appropriate learning resources are finally packaged to a PIF file (SCORM
package) and delivered to the eLearning applications.
Figure 6.
The instructional ontology
A Training is a collection of abstract training scenarios regarding
one domain. The same subject can be teached in several ways (TrainingMethods) depending on the LearningStyle and the EducationalLevel of the Learner. There
are several categorizations of Learning Styles and Educational Levels, thus
these elements are flexible so that being able to point to values of different
taxonomies. A TrainingMethod consists
of a hierarchy of ActivityStructures
built from Activities (elements taken
from IMS LD) forming an arbitrarily complex structure of activities (sequence
or selection). Since this model is RDF-based (OWL), existing ActivitiesStructures or paths of ActivitiesStructures can be reused in
many Learning Designs. Each Training,
ActivityStructure and Activity has a LearningObjective. Learning Objectives are treated here in a more
formal way (as in SeLeNe project (Keenoy,
Levene & Peterson, 2004)), than pure text descriptions. Thus, each LearningObjective has: (a) a learning_objective_verb, taken from a
subset of the outcome-illustrating verbs which characterise each type of
learning objectives specified by a committee of college and university
examiners in 1956 (known as "Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom & Krathwohl, 1965)). This subset has been selected for
the description of Learning Objectives by the SeLeNe project. (b) a learning_objective_topic that indicates
the topic that the learning objective is about, referenced as an entry in the
RDF binding of a subject taxonomy or ontology (context ontology e.g. ACM
Computing Taxonomy (ACM, 1998)), and (c) learning_objective_annotation
that indicates additional textual description of the learning objective; for
example, to specify areas within the topic at a greater level of detail than is
catered for by the subject taxonomy (or ontology). The LearningObjectType class is used to describe the desired Learning
Object characteristics (requirements) without binding specific objects with Activities on design time. If more than
one entries are used per Activity,
the interpretation is “OR”. Via the related_with
property we can further restrict the preferred learning objects connecting them
with DomainConcepts or individuals
from a domain ontology.
4.1.3
The Learner
Information Model (LIM)
With the huge range of
digital educational resources becoming widely available and the opportunities
afforded by the Internet and the Web, there is currently a trend towards the
constructivist approach to eLearning (Burr, 1995). This approach puts the student at the centre of the learning
process with the objective of tailoring educational resources to the individual
learner’s requirements and goals.
In addition, there is
widespread recognition that learning is a life-long process and that learning
technology systems need to track, manage and exchange information about their
students. Learner information comes
from three broad sources: personal information (address, telephone number
etc.); preferences (operating system, network connection, desktop
configuration, learning style etc.); and academic information (courses
completed, grades etc.).
However, in order to match
and tailor resources to an individual’s requirements, it is also necessary to
describe resources in an appropriate way, using for example the IEEE Learning
Object Metadata (LOM) Standard (IEEE LOM, 2002). In this review, we will
concentrate on learner information whilst recognising that there is a
complementary issue with regard to the description of educational resources.
Much of the work on
personalisation of eLearning has been based on metadata about a user or
learner. The techniques fall into two
broad categories:
·
Adaptive hypermedia: mostly related to adapting user interfaces, navigation, content
selection and presentation according to the user’s performance in a particular
domain.
·
Filtering and recommendation: based on
interests, preferences, likes, dislikes and goals a user has. Resources are
recommended according to features extracted from a description of the resource
or according to its ratings by users with a similar profile.
Given the open and
heterogeneous nature of the Web, there has been much emphasis on
interoperability and reuse of educational resources. To this end, there have been two major attempts to standardize a
learner profile, IEEE Personal and Private Information (PAPI) (IEEE PAPI, 2002)
and the IMS Learner Information Package (LIP) (IMS LIP, 2005).
According to Dolog &
Nejdl (Dolog & Nejdl, 2003) these standards have been developed from
different points of view. The PAPI standard reflects ideas from intelligent
tutoring systems where the performance information is considered as the most
important information about a learner. PAPI also stresses the importance of
inter-personal relationships. On the other hand the LIP standard is based on
the classical notion of a CV and inter-personal relationships are not
considered.
One way forward is
therefore to draw on both of the standards as a means of developing an adequate
learner model, as in the ELENA Project (ELENA Project).
Figure 7.
The Learner Information Model
Since the intention is to
use SCORM in the Task 5.4 prototype framework, the User Model is based largely
on IMS LIP, drawing on PAPI to fill in any gaps. SCORM uses IMS Content
Packaging, which is also recommended by IMS LIP for the aggregation and
packaging of learner information. Additional application specific elements are
also be required; these are drawn together using the concept of Application
Profiles (Heery & Patel, 2004; Baker, Dekkers, Heery, Patel & Salokhe,
2001). In broad terms, application profiles are a type of metadata element set
that draws on metadata terms from extant vocabularies and customises them for a
local or specific application.
Figure 7 summarizes the T5.4 Learner Information Model, which
is currently encoded in OWL.
Task 5.5 builds upon earlier Delos work and in particular
upon the Semantic Interoperability in Digital Library Systems Report
(D5.3.1) http://delos-wp5.ukoln.ac.uk/project-outcomes/
produced during JPA1. It is concerned with the interoperability of data models
and core ontologies which underpin the development of diverse digital library
systems. The Task will investigate and develop methods for the integration of
heterogeneous data types, models, upper level ontologies and domain specific
knowledge organisation systems. The main objectives are:
·
To achieve harmonisation of the FRBR-CIDOC Conceptual
Reference Model (CRM) core ontologies.
·
To produce mappings of the CRM core ontology to the
metadata schema of TEI and Dublin Core.
·
To develop and evaluate a demonstrator for a case study
on the mapping of a Knowledge Organisation System (KOS) to a core ontology.
The lead partner is FORTH with Athens University of
Economics & Business, Glamorgan, Imperial College, Ionian University, Lund,
MTA Sztaki, NTNU, and TUC.
The
potential impact of this Task both within Delos and across the wider community is
considerable. There are three major aspects: metadata integration in key
application areas, metadata integration in general, and core ontology
harmonization.
The task is aiming to integrate the core ontology (ISO21127)
describing the data structure semantics of museum / cultural heritage
documentation with the one describing the future semantics of general library
metadata (FRBR). The combined core
ontology will allow for high precision schema integration of museums, libraries
and archives (“MLA”) information. The widely accepted Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has limitations in
its scope and level of granularity. The limits of applicability of the CRM for
metadata integration in general have not yet been encountered (smaller
extensions notwithstanding). It has the potential to become a core ontology for
Digital Library metadata in general. This will be demonstrated by the CRM Core
metadata elements, which are compatible with Dublin Core, but implement the key
element of the CIDOC CRM and the ABC Model: explicit event representation.
The
demonstrator will show the solution to a generic problem of metadata and schema
integration in a particular case study using cultural heritage data. The more
usual approaches to metadata interoperability, such as metadata registries and
application profiles, work only with nearly homogeneous materials. The problem
will become more acute when future digital libraries include all kinds of
scientific data and multimedia material and the “simpler” approaches will reach
their limits. Potential beneficiaries of this work include all library and
digital library developers who want to integrate highly heterogeneous
resources, such as the TEL, MICHAEL and BRICKS Projects.
The
methodology of harmonizing core ontologies has been developed in the previous
DELOS Project, with the harmonization of ABC and CRM. The problems and method
have already been published.
Task 5.5 will carry out the task of harmonizing/merging the CIDOC CRM and FRBR
through a series of meetings with invited experts and also students
participating as part of their professional development.
From month
13 onwards, substantial progress has been achieved for Task 5.5.
Harmonization
FRBR-CIDOC CRM:
Three
working meetings led by FORTH have been held for the elaboration of a common
ontology for FRBR and CIDOC CRM:
a)
Imperial
College London, February 14-16 2005.
b)
FORTH,
Heraklion, Crete, July 4-6 2005.
c)
Germanische
Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany, November 16-18, 2005.
These
meetings were attended by leading experts from IFLA and CIDOC:
Patrick LeBoeuf, Bibliotheque nationale de France (BNF), Service de
normalisation documentaire (Standardization Department). Chair of the IFLA Working Group on
the FRBR Review. (Funded by DELOS).
Maja Žumer, University of Ljubljana, Library Science and FRBR expert.
(Funded by DELOS).
Christian-Emil Ore, University of Oslo, Chair of CIDOC.
Stephen Stead, Consultant, Vice Chair of CIDOC.
In the first two meetings, the
conceptualization behind FRBR was analyzed as a graphical model extending the
CIDOC CRM (ISO21127). It comprises the entities and relationships defined in
FRBR, dealing with the notions of:
a)
Conception
of a work.
b)
First
realization of a work in a symbolic form.
c)
Reuse
of work and continuation of work.
d)
The
contribution and product of the publisher.
e)
The
equivalence of electronic and material publishing.
The third
meeting covered making textual definitions of classes and part of the
relationships, as well as elaboration of the introduction. This harmonization
process has resulted in a CRM Core ontology described in model form in Figure
5.
Figure 5.
CRM Core ontology. (From Martin Doerr, FORTH).
Detailed reports of each meeting have been distributed to the partners of Task
5.5. The work represents a considerable intellectual achievement, since FRBR
has not analyzed these processes to the level of detail necessary to produce a
formal ontology, nor has there been any other work addressing these issues in a
more formal way. In particular it has not modeled any process responsible for
the existence of objects of bibliographic concern. The model now comprises 44
classes and 56 properties. It follows strictly the methodology used for
ISO21127. It could be formulated without difficulties as a specialization of
the CIDOC CRM classes. Considerable effort was needed to detect and resolve
inconsistencies or fuzzy concepts in FRBR. See Figure 6. There have also been
discussions to clarify concepts in the transition from the old to the new
bibliographic practice which is underlying FRBR. Preliminary results have been
presented at ECDL2005.
To be
acceptable in the user communities, the model must be defined in a textual form
with an introduction, description of its purpose and modeling methodology, and
explicit scope notes and examples for each class and property. The class scope
notes have been drafted and are expected to be finished and accepted by the
working group by month 24. The work will continue in JPA3.
To
produce mappings of the CRM core ontology:
The
combined FRBR-CIDOC CRM model has been formally defined in OWL and TELOS. The
GraphOnto tool from TUC has been functionally extended to be able to describe
mappings between multiple ontologies. It is being evaluated by WP4 partners and
based on this feedback, TUC will implement a second version of the enhanced
GraphOnto with ontology mapping functionality that will be available by the
month 30. TUC is also integrating a reasoning functionality to GraphOnto in
order to support queries on top of ontologies. This functionality will be used
to develop a retrieval demonstrator.
A mapping
of Dublin Core to the CIDOC CRM has been defined and Ionian University (IU) has
started working in two main areas:
evaluation of the GraphOnto tool in co-operation with TUC to test the
ontology uploading, creation and edit functions and experimentation with CRM.
The research team has studied the CRM and now is developing a description of an
excavation in Corfu, with the usage of the GraphOnto tool.
IU focuses
on the mapping of DC-types to CRM: a first draft will be available by the month
24. See Figure 7. In addition, a mapping of a subset of EAD elements (version
2.0) to CRM will be tested. In particular IU plans to deal with the mapping of
the <EADheader> as well some basic compound elements included in the
<archdesc> element such as the <did>, <dsc>, <bioghist>
and <scopecontent>.
SZTAKI is
investigating new methods for collaborative support of the ontology mapping
process. SZTAKI also experiments with query facilities in the scenario of
multiple mapped ontologies. The CORES registry operated by SZTAKI contains more
than 30 metadata schemas (element sets, application profiles, etc.) which can
be browsed and searched in a connected way. This registry was connected with an
OAI service provider with 500.000 records. The connection enables automatic
adaptation of the service provider to schema changes. Furthermore, SZTAKI
implemented a web-based search interface which is capable to construct and
execute queries combining the use of several metadata schemas.
Figure 6.
CIDOC CRM-FRBR harmonization. (From Martin Doerr, FORTH).
Figure 7.
Resolving schema heterogeneity. (From Martin Doerr, FORTH).
Case
study and demonstrator:
A case
study for deriving an elaborate data structure and a core data structure for
describing cultural objects from the CIDOC CRM core ontology will be available
at month 24. These are the first steps to demonstrate in practical examples the
utility of mapping to common core ontologies, and of merging core ontologies
from related domains. The case study scoping work has been led by the
University of Glamorgan through leverage of the ongoing English Heritage (EH)
Revelation project and their application/extension of the CRM core schema to EH
archaeology (CRM-EH). English Heritage have created a new Environmental
Archaeology Thesaurus (EAT). While this is a new thesaurus, it closely matches
index terms used in the EH Environmental Archaeological Bibliography (EAB),
which will be the database for the case study. Lund have made preparations for
the retrieval demonstrator including investigation of different technical
alternatives.
All the
above results can be demonstrated or provided in the form of documents. They will become part of the Deliverable
D5.0.2 due in month 30.
Athens University
of Economics & Business contribution has been delayed due to continuing
processing of its new membership in DELOS.
Work
continues and the Final status report for this Work Package due at month 30
will include the mappings and the demonstrator.
UKOLN is continuing to act as cluster co-ordinator. A number
of new partners have been formally accepted by the Commission and welcomed into
the cluster. They include the University of Glamorgan, Imperial College, London
and the Athens University of Economics and Business. Each has brought
additional relevant skills and expertise to the Network. Negotiations with
another prospective partner DTSC, Australia (Dr Jane Hunter) have been delayed
due to Hunter moving institutions to the University of Queensland during 2005.
The
cluster has operated effectively and had three face-to-face meetings in 2005:
in February, (Imperial College, London), May, (Crete) and September, (Vienna).
The first cluster meeting of 2006 has been held on February 21st in
London. In parallel work on the JPA2 tasks has been pursued through separate
Task meetings and more details are given below.
Two Task 5.4 coordination
meetings have taken place:
·
Crete-Heraklion (on 13/5/2005) hosted by FORTH, and
·
Vienna (on 23/9/2005) hosted by TUV.
However, several other informal meetings have taken place
between the Greek partners (TUC and Ionian University).
A researcher exchange has been achieved: a MSc student of
the Ionian University (Haroula Consolaki) has been moved to the Technical
University of Crete for better collaboration between the two partners.
Two Task 5.5 coordination
meetings have taken place:
·
Crete-Heraklion (on 13/5/2005) hosted by FORTH, and
·
Vienna (on 23/9/2005) hosted by TUV.
Three CRM-FRBR Harmonization Workshops have taken place as
described in Section 5.1.
The Cluster Co-ordinator attended Scientific
Board Meetings in Vienna and Nice and telcons, the Advisory Board meeting in
Nice and the Project Review in Luxembourg in 2005. The Cluster Co-ordinator was
unable to attend the All Tasks meeting held in Paris in January/February 2006
because the meeting dates were changed at relatively short notice and there
were existing diary commitments.
The cluster Web site http://delos-wp5.ukoln.ac.uk/
has been maintained and updated with
information relating to the new tasks. A private area has been set up for the
sharing of draft documents, presentation slides and other work items. All items
for dissemination have been linked to the cluster pages and deliverables made
available.
9th
Thematic Workshop on Digital Repositories: Interoperability & Common
Services, The Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH),
Heraklion, Crete, 11-13 May, 2005. Proceedings published and on Cluster Web http://delos-wp5.ukoln.ac.uk/
Workshop Papers:
R.John Robertson,
Jane Barton
"Optimising Metadata Workflows
in a Distributed Environment" [PDF]
Chryssoula Bekiari, Panos Constantopoulos, Martin Doerr
"Information
design for cultural documentation" [PDF]
José Borbinha,
Jorge Machado
"DEPTAL: A Framework for
Institutional Repositories" [PDF]
G. Knight, A.
Wilson
"SHERPA DP: Establishing a
persistent preservation environment for institutional repositories"
[PDF]
Panos Constantopoulos, Martin Doerr, Meropi Petraki
"Reliability modelling for
long-term digital preservation" [PDF]
Carl Rauch, Franz
Pavuza, Stephan Strodl, Andreas Rauber
"Evaluating preservation
strategies for audio and video files" [PDF]
Franz Pavuza
"Signal Ingest in Uncompromising
Liner Video Archiving: Pitfalls, Loopholes and Solutions" [PDF]
Ed Crewe
"Extending the Open Journals
OAI repository with RDF aggregation and querying (African Journals Online)"
[PDF]
Zeno Tajoli (short paper)
"METALIS, an OAI Service
Provider" [PDF]
Boon Low, John MacColl
"Searching Heterogenoeous
e-Learning Resources" [PDF]
Cezary Mazurek,
Marcin Werla (short paper)
"Digital Object Lifecycle in dLibra
Digital Library Framework" [PDF]
Other papers and presentations
Arahova, A., Kapidakis, S.: Empowering Our Libraries,
Empowering Our Education System: Using the Research Results for Implementing
Not the best, but the Most Effective Policy for School Libraries. IFLA
(International Federation of Libraries Associations) Conference, August 14-18,
2005, Oslo, Norway.
Ardö, A. Focused crawling in the ALVIS semantic search engine
[PDF]
ESWC2005 - 2nd Annual European Semantic
Web Conference in
Heraklion, Crete May 29 to June 1, 2005
Binding C.
"XML Techniques for the Representation
and Interchange of Thesaurus Data" [HTML]
D-Lib Magazine Volume 11 Number 1, January 2005.
Christodoulakis S,
Polyxeni Arapi, Nektarios Moumoutzis, Manjula Patel, Sarantos Kapidakis,
Antonia Arahova, Lina Boudouri
Interoperability of eLearning
Applications with Audiovisual Digital Libraries[PDF]
the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital
Libraries (ECDL 2005) September 18-23, 2005 Vienna, Austria
Simon Coles, Jeremy Frey, Michael Hursthouse, Mark Light, Leslie
Carr, David DeRoure, Christopher Gutteridge, Hugo Mills, Ken Meacham, Mike
Surridge, Liz Lyon, Rachel Heery, Monica Duke, and Michael Day.
The 'end to end' crystallographic
experiment in an e-Science environment: From conception to publication.
In: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2005,
Nottingham, UK, 19-23 Sep 2005. Southampton, UK. (In Press)
Paper and Powerpoint presentation available from the University of Southampton
e-Prints Service: [entry in
repository ]
Ding, H., Sølvberg,
I. Choosing Appropriate Peer-to-Peer
Infrastructure for Your Digital Libraries [HTML]
ICADL 2005, LNCS 3815, pp.457-462.
Doerr, M. Waking
from a Dogmatic Slumber - A Different View on Knowledge Management for DLs
DELOS NoE Brainstorming Meeting, Juan-les-Pins, France, December 5-6, 2005
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
[HTML]
Monica Duke, Michael Day, Rachel Heery, Leslie A. Carr,
Simon J. Coles
Enhancing access to research data: the
challenge of crystallography
JCDL 2005 Digital Libraries:
Cyberinfrastructure for Research and Education, Denver, Colorado, USA June
7-11, 2005.
Paper (preprint): [PDF
| MS
Word] Abstract: [HTML]
Abstract (and full text for subscribers) from: [ACM Portal]
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
Csaba Fülöp, Gergő Kiss, László Kovács, András Micsik:
"Using a Metadata Schema Registry in the National Digital Data Archive of
Hungary", the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology
for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2005) September 18-23, 2005 Vienna, Austria.
Golub, K. and A.
Ardö Importance of HTML
structural elements and metadata in automated subject classification
[PDF]
Proceedings of ECDL 2005 - the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced
Technology for Digital Libraries
Vienna, Austria, 18-23 September 2005. P. 368-378
Golub, K. Automated subject classification of textual Web
pages, for browsing (PDF)
T hesis for the degree of Licentiate in Philosophy, Swedish intermediate degree
between Master's and Doctoral degrees
Lund: Department of Information Technology, Lund University. ISBN:
91-7167-034-3.
[Formatted for 220 x 155 mm], 2005
Golub, K.and
Larsen, B.
Different approaches to automated
classification: Is there an exchange of ideas? [PDF]
Proceedings of ISSI 2005 - the 10th International Conference of the
International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics
Stockholm, Sweden, 24-28 July 2005, Vol. 1. Heery, R. and Anderson, S.. Digital repositories review. Report
to accompany JISC Digital Repositories Programme call, February 2005. Available
from: <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories>
Golub, K. Automated subject classification of textual Web
documents
Accepted for publication in Journal of Documentation. 2005.
Hursthouse, M.B., S. J. Coles, J. G. Frey, L. Carr, C.
Gutteridge, L. Lyon, R. Heery, M. Duke, M. Day
ECRYSTALS(.CHEM.SOTON.AC.UK): Open
Archive Publication of Crystal Structure Data [poster]
XX Congress of the International Union of Crystallography,
Florence, Italy, 23-31 August 2005
Software
demo: Grid Computing and Crystallography
Poster presentation: [Abstract]
Kalogerakis, V., Christodoulakis, S., Moumoutzis, N.:
Coupling Ontologies with Graphics Content for Knowledge Driven Visualization.
IEEE Virtual Reality International Conference, March 2006, Virginia, USA (to
appear).
Koch, T., Golub, K.
and Ardö, A. Users browsing
behaviour in a DDC-based Web service: A Log Analysis.
Accepted for publication in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 2005.
Koch, T. The
e-Science project eBank UK.
NetLab Society Seminar, Lund, Sweden, 1 September 2005
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
Lyon, L. Digital
Libraries and e-Research: new horizons, new challenges?
8th International Bielefeld Conference, Bielefeld, Germany, February 2006
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
[HTML]
Lyon, L. Adding
value to open access research data: reflections on the process of data
curation. Third European Conference on Research
Infrastructures, Nottingham, UK, 6-7 December 2005.
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
[HTML]
Lyon, L. Adding
value to open access research data: the eBank UK Project.
CERN workshop on Innovations in
Scholarly Communication (OAI4), Geneva, Switzerland, 22 October 2005.
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
[HTML]
Lyon, L. Developing
e-Infrastructure to support new research and learning paradigms.
Building the Info Grid. Digital Library
Technologies and Services - Trends and Perspectives. DEFF conference,
Copenhagen, 26-27 September 2005
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
[HTML]
Lyon, L. Data,
information and knowledge repositories: developing infrastructure to support
the e-Research landscape.
euroCRIS Strategic Seminar, Brussels, September 2005
Presentation: [Powerpoint]
[HTML]
Lyon, L. From
research data to new knowledge: a lifecycle approach.
Making the strategic case for institutional repositories. CNI-JISC-SURF
Conference, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, 10-11
May 2005.
Lund, H., Larsen,
B., Voel Jensen, R.E., Ardö, A., Golub, K. and Ingwersen, P.
Capturing Contexts for Web Filtering in the
Hum anities [PDF]
Second Workshop on Information Retrieval in Context (IRiX), SIGIR 2005.
Sølvberg, I.,
Larsen, R., and Mitra, S. Digital
Libraries and e-Learnin.g
Panel discussion InfoVision 2005, Bangalore, 15-16 September, 2005
Tentori,
A. Concerted Information Management in a
Virtual Library[PDF]
Master's Thesis, Department of Information Technology, Lund University, March
7, 2005.
Tsinaraki, C., Polydoros, P., Christodoulakis, S.:
GraphOnto: A Component and a User Interface for the Definition and Use of
Ontologies in Multimedia Information Systems. In Proc. of AvivDiLib 2005, pp.
99-102.
Tudhope D., Binding
C.
Towards Terminology Services: experiences
with a pilot web service thesaurus browser
Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata
Applications, (DC 2005), 269-273.
Tudhope, D. The
FACET project and implications for the Semantic Web
7th NKOS workshop on Next Generation Knowledge Organization Systems:
Integration Challenges and Strategies, Denver, June, 2005
Tudhope, D. Applications
of NKOS: some examples and questions
NKOS Special Session at Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Conference (DC 2005),
Madrid, September, 2005.
KOS issue forthcoming in NRHM 2006 - The New Review
of Hypermedia and Multimedia 2006 (1). Special Issue Call for Papers on:
Knowledge Organization Systems and Services. Guest Editors: Douglas Tudhope,
University of Glamorgan, UK (dstudhope@glam.ac.uk),
Marianne Lykke Nielsen, Royal School of Library and Information Science,
Denmark (mln@db.dk).
The Task 5.5 work was presented in the DELOS poster session hold in conjunction with
ECDL 2005.
NKOS
Workshop led by Doug Tudhope has been accepted for ECDL 2006.
KESI cluster Ontology-driven Semantic Interoperablility work
was also promoted in the US in December 2005 by Dolores Iorizzo, Imperial
College:
1) Cornell University: Presentation of results to Computer
Science Group working in Digital Libraries and discussion held with Carl Lagoze
to look at a way of integrating our work with the National Science Digital
Library and FEDORA. The meeting was very successful and Carl and Dolores
did a joint presentation about future work funded by NSF-DELOS in Washington
DC.
2) OCLC: Presentation of results and CIDOC CRM-FRBR
harmonisation to members of OCLC (including Lorcan Dempsey, Ed O´Neill
and Stu Weibel). There was general agreement to do an analysis of the
FRBR+CRM, and also take-up of CRM CORE as a possible enriched Dublin Core (i.e.
testing of TEL, CRM CORE and DC to determine best results).
3) NSF: Presentation of results to NSF Directorates (hosted
by Steve Griffin and Lee Zia) on WP5 and our vision for the future.
Positive outcomes included an invitation to discuss international cooperation
between NSF-DELOS on global Cyberinfrastructure, and possible international
conference event in summer 2006.
This type of dissemination is particularly valuable since it
raises awareness of Delos in the wider community and facilitates broader take
up of Delos standards activity.
7
JPA3 plans
The strategy for scoping JPA3 activity has been largely to
build on existing work.
The architectural aspects
of integrating eLearning applications on top of digital libraries that have
been identified will be dealt-with within JPA2 in order to produce a prototype
by the end of JPA2. However, many more issues are expected to appear during the
design and implementation that will need further investigations. In addition,
two very important issues for the integration of applications on top of digital
libraries have appeared and some preliminary investigation has been done. The
first is the development of an Earth Sciences’ digital library according to the
T5.4 eLearning environment for the provision of eLearning in Geography, and the
second is the support of interoperability and semantics for 3D objects. The
latter is very important both in eLearning and eScience applications
(chemistry, biology, archeology, etc.). Note that MPEG7 does not really cover
the semantics of 3D objects where other standards are more pertinent (like X3D
and Maya). An initial approach for both areas has been done already within JPA2
and reports are in preparation. The initial investigations showed a very reach
set of research issues related to the task as well.
According to the ITF
report, the ITF identified 3 activities that are not direct evolution of the
current JPA, but would be worth investigating due to their relevance in the
future scenarios. From these, two are satisfied by this task:
1.
audio DLs: this activity
should investigate the management of digital libraries of audio objects, with
respect to the classical problems: storing, accessing, indexing, retrieving, as
well as to the definition of typical services related to this kind of medium,
which has also a high potential commercial value.
2.
e-science digital
libraries: although DELOS addresses e-health, there is a wider range of
science-related digital libraries, including, e.g. bio-informatics and
earth-science, that are becoming increasingly important in the scientific and
scholar fields.
IU and TUC have already
succeeded in negotiations for using selected material from the Greek National
Educational Radio-Television whose purpose is to be used at schools and a rich
catalog with available audio and/or audiovisual material has been organized. An
investigation of material for e-learning suitable to the age of the pupils in
an audiovisual form has been done.
During JPA3, the task will:
·
Select an appropriate
geography domain ontology (http://reliant.teknowledge.com/DAML/Geography.owl)
which is based on:
1.
CIA World Fact Book for
geographic regions.
2.
WFB climate data
interpreted using Koeppen Climate Classification system summary at http://www.fao.org/WAICENT/FAOINFO/sustdev/EIdirect/climate/EIsp0002.htm
3.
Sea Level definitions at
http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/puscience/index.html
.
Population
of the classes of the geography domain ontology, based on the courses to be
developed.
·
Create a digital library
of geography learning material, based on the interoperability architecture
developed in JPA2, by digitizing and segmenting selected material from the
Greek National Educational Radio-Television archives. Indexing of the material
will be made using the enriched geography domain ontology.
·
According to the
instructional ontology developed in JPA2 abstract training abstract training
scenarios (learning designs) for geography teaching (based on secondary school
curricula) will be developed. The scenario nodes (activities) will be connected
with the enriched geography domain ontology.
·
Creation of Model for
Usage-Oriented Evaluation of eLearning applications with audiovisual digital
libraries, that support the modular development of personalized learning
experiences inside a virtual environment according to specific measurement
strategy.
As
the hardware and software capabilities in graphics are continuously improving
the number of 3D models available in online repositories is growing
dramatically. These objects may be associated with domain semantics and then
used in elearning experiences in various fields such as science, culture,
history etc. The semantic enrichment of scenes can play an extremely important
role in enabling the viewers to query, understand and interact with the usually
complex and incomprehensible visualized information, in simple, intuitive and
user-friendly ways and allowing them to identify 3D objects or sets of them
based on their graphical and semantic properties and relationships with other
objects in the scene at a time. Interactive queries, such as “what is this
object which I clicked upon with my mouse?”, “what is the functionality, the
behavior and the role of the component represented by this object?” or “show
all the components of the same type or of the same hierarchical level of
abstraction and hide all the others from the scene” should be answered with the
appropriate visual and textual response. Such queries could allow users to explore
the external and inner parts of the models and understand their behavioral and
functional patterns, which usually carry mappings with processes and events of
the real world. The mere visual display of complex and large amounts of
information is not sufficient itself to answer such queries especially when
viewers do not possess sophisticated knowledge of the domain related to the
visualized information. Such functionality should be supported by 3D repository
services in coherent manner. Designers
are also interested in generating, updating or deleting graphics content from
the scenes based on the semantics of the visualized information. For example,
user commands, like “apply a half-transparent material to all the objects
representing the concept X (e.g. a window)” or “apply a transformation
(translation, rotation, scaling etc.) to all the objects representing the
concept Y according to its properties” or even “create a 3D object for every
instance of concept Z accordingly”, could significantly facilitate or even
automate the manipulation of the graphics content according to the specific
domain knowledge that is coupled with the scenes. The above manipulation
commands can also be personalized with the help of user profiles. A simple
example of personalization of the scenes would be: “apply a specific background
stored in the user’s profile to the scene” or “apply this material taken by the
same user’s profile to every object representing the concept W”. User profiles
combined with domain knowledge could automatically adapt the content of the
scenes to designers’ preferences.
This proposal continues WP5 Task
5.5 “ontology-driven
interoperability” from JPA2. The proposal addresses the cluster’s key
aim of achieving semantic
interoperability at both data and metadata levels. Knowledge
Organization Systems (KOS), such as classifications, gazetteers and thesauri
provide a controlled vocabulary and model the underlying semantic structure of
a domain for purposes of retrieval. Ontologies provide a higher level
conceptualisation with more formal definition of roles and semantic
relationships. The objective
of this project is the investigation and development of methods for the
integration of heterogeneous data types, models, upper level ontologies and domain specific KOS.
This effort will be driven by a domain overarching core ontology starting from
the CIDOC CRM (ISOCD21127).
The challenge for the next generation of
information access systems is the ability to retrieve complementary objects and
deep paths of relevant relationships that cross multiple document and resource
boundaries. Complementary information can only be identified against an
application and domain overarching core-ontology, that allows for relating,
mediating or translating the elements of necessarily heterogeneous data and
metadata schemata employed in multiple applications and domains.
The main
focus of the work proposed for JPA3 is:
1.
To
provide a core ontology that covers the basic conceptualization of documentation
in libraries, archives and collections of cultural and scientific heritage.
This will be based on completion of the FRBR-CIDOC CRM harmonization work.
2. To demonstrate, how complementary
information documented in metadata structures of very different form and level
of detail can be retrieved coherently under the core ontology, and how domain
ontologies and indexing languages must fit under the core ontology in order to
do so. This work will be based on further developing and extending the demonstrator
to include the English Heritage archaeological ‘grey literature ‘reports and
the Archaeobotanical Computer database (ABCD). This will allow investigation of
the core ontology to facilitate cross-domain linking and search from
Environmental Archaeology to Economic Botany via biological taxonomies, and
linking from datasets to literature.
Organisation and delivery of the Workshop in
Task 5.1 has proceeded jointly with the Preservation Cluster and this has been very
productive. There are other areas of synergy around characteristics of a
trusted digital repository, curation and preservation requirements for
repositories and audit and certification. There are also potential links to
digital library architectures and reference models work (WP1) when considering
the role of federated repositories as content providers in service oriented
architectures and frameworks. These points will be fully investigated in the
rescheduled D1.4.0.
Tasks 5.4 and 5.5 have much commonality since
both are concerned primarily with metadata and semantic interoperability. The
management of complex objects is a key issue for developers of digital
libraries, e-learning materials and e-research data sources. In the Delos
context, there are strong links between WP3 and WP5 through investigations of
content packaging for multimedia objects and associated metadata standards such
as METS, MPEG 21 DIDL etc.
Task 5.4 is also working to extend GraphOnto, the interactive ontology editor and ontology mappings
tool for OWL. GraphOnto which has been developed by TUC, is used in
several DELOS tasks (T3.6, T3.9, T3.10, T3.11, T5.4 and T5.5) and is offered
through the DELOS Web site (Universities outside DELOS have also obtained it).
The tool is being extended to provide full ontology mappings and query
mappings. Wider use of the tool will clearly be advantageous to integration
efforts across the Delos network.
Following on from the All Tasks
meeting in Paris in January/February 2006, this idea has been explored further
in a paper from TUC which highlights common components and Task
inter-relationships focussing on semantic multimedia management. GraphOnto is
identified as the common tool for describing all components and/or applications
in the eight named tasks. It is also proposed that the future focus of the
tasks should be towards “providing service-oriented interfaces to the outside
world and compatibility with the OSIRIS platform”.
In general, the activities of the
cluster have progressed well. A number of new partners have been formally
accepted by the Commission and welcomed into the cluster. They include the
University of Glamorgan, Imperial College, London and the Athens University of
Economics and Business. Each has brought additional relevant skills and
expertise to the Network. Negotiations with another prospective partner DTSC,
Australia (Dr Jane Hunter) have been delayed due to Hunter moving institutions
to the University of Queensland during 2005.
The partners are working
effectively together and communication channels have been adequate with a mix
of face-to-face meetings and email discussion. Some cluster partners have been
more active than others but these organisations have been more deeply
involved/lead other clusters and inevitably resources must be managed within
the available funding constraints.
Dissemination activity has
continued to grow and can be expected to increase as more research outputs and
deliverables become available. A total of 30 published papers and invited (high-profile)
international conference presentations have been produced. Awareness of
ontology-driven interoperability work has been raised in the US
In Task 5.1 Information
Repositories and Open Archives (from JPA1), the 9th Delos Thematic
workshop on Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services was held in Heraklion, Crete on 11-13 May
2005 with Sandy Payette, Co-Director Fedora Project, Cornell University, USA
giving the Keynote speech. Digital Repositories are the focus of much
investment and development activity around the globe and it is anticipated that
the delayed Deliverable D5.1.1 (now due June 2006), will be received with much
interest from the community. The delays have resulted from staff ill health and
conflicting core funder (JISC) commitments at the partner site.
Task 5.4 which focuses on
e-Learning Applications and Digital Libraries has produced six internal
deliverable reports (on Interoperability
framework and architecture, Semantic mapping between SCORM and MPEG7 concepts, Investigation of content packaging options,
Personalization, Learning
Styles, and Instructional
ontology) relating to aspects of interoperability. These are
informing the development of the demonstrator. The GraphOnto tool
has been used in this task to develop the ontology mappings.[X1] It has also
been identified as a key integration element for the KESI cluster and for the
wider task activities of the Delos network.
Task 5.5 Ontology-driven
Interoperability is building on the JPA1 Report Semantic Interoperability in
Digital Library Systems Report (D5.3.1) through the CIDOC-CRM / FRBR
Harmonisation work, which has produced a core ontology and draft detailed
model; mappings from CRM to Dublin Core and some preparatory modelling for the
cultural heritage demonstrator.
Finally
looking ahead, a
JPA3 work
is continuing, building largely on existing activity.proposal has been prepared and submitted to the Scientific Board based on extending the
Ontology-driven Interoperability work.
This
section gives some general information about KESI cluster partners. The cluster
has also developed collaboration with British Telecom, UK through David
Alsmeyer and with Dr Jane Hunter at the University of Queensland, Australia. It
is hoped that the latter organization will become a formal partner during 2006.
http://www.ethz.ch/index_EN
http://www.forth.gr/
FORTH is leading the CIDOC CRM SIG development
team and has initialized together with BNF the dialogue with FRBR. It has led the Harmonization of CIDOC CRM
and ABC Harmony under the previous DELOS Project. FORTH is contributing to WP5,
Task 3 Semantic Interoperability and WP2, Task 2. FORTH develops RDF
Technology. FORTH develops advanced cultural information systems and digital
library system components.
Imperial College is leading the
Newton Project. In the first
five years of its existence, the Newton Project has produced the first ever
comprehensive catalogue of Newton's non-'scientific' papers
and has placed online nearly 50 per cent of the two and a half million words he
devoted to the subject of theology, as well as a large selection of his personal and scientific papers. At the beginning of 2004, a closely
linked sister project in the US received funding to begin similar work on the alchemical
papers. Contact
person is: Dolores Iorizzo worked for many years on the Commentaria in
Aristotelem Graeca Project at King's College, London. She has held lectureships in
Philosophy and Medical Ethics at King's College, London and Imperial College,
London. She has also worked extensively as a Project Coordinator for global
development economics projects. Her main area of research is in the
transmission of Aristotelian and Stoic philosophical and medical theories into
the Early Modern period. Now she is member of the Newton Project Staff.
IU participates in Cluster 2 dealing with
semantic interoperability and information integration - the 3 faculty and 4 PhD
students have recently written (with TUC) a state of the art review (activity
2, Task 2.2) on semantic interoperability. Participates in Cluster 7 (DL
Evaluation) where it deals with interaction and DL services evaluation. IU has
developed and maintains Cluster 7’s website (http://dlib.ionio.gr/wp7) and
discussion forum (http://dlib.ionio.gr/delosforum).
MTA SZTAKI DSD:
- Participation in all of previous DELOS projects
- Development of DL reference model (previous Delos NoE)
- Implementation of the MetaLibrary service for DL evaluation and testbed
collection
- Participated in CORES EU project, operating public registry for metadata
schemas
- Implementation of a national OAI-based harvester and service provider
- Participating in INFRAWEBS project for implementing a framework for Semantic
Web Services
Knowledge Discovery and Digital Library Research
Group (KnowLib), Lund University (Sweden)
http://www.it.lth.se/knowlib/
Research focuses on networked knowledge
organization. KnowLib research group
continues work in automated classification and focused Web-crawling (FP6 ALVIS,
http://combine.it.lth.se/), develops
intelligent DL components, eg DELOS harvesting/search, and News. Active in
international NKOS efforts. Integration efforts in DELOS include active
participation in Cluster 5, and developing components for the DELOS Web-server.http://www.lub.lu.se/knowtech/
1.1Research focuses on
networked knowledge organization (eg Renardus). KnowLib group continues work in
automated classification (FP6 ALVIS), develops intelligent DL components, eg
DELOS harvesting/search, and News. Active in international NKOS efforts.
Integration efforts in DELOS include active participation in Cluster 5,
organization of a semantic interoperability workshop and running DELOS
Web-server.
10.8 NTNU
NTNU has experience from FRBR related projects
and has current activities on the implementation of a datamodel for FRBR and
the application of FRBR in a large scale library catalogue. NTNU is WP7
participant and will coordinate a proposed metadata evaluation JPA with high
relevance to this project proposals.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.music.tuc.gr/Research/Projects.htm
The activities of TUC include
research, development, training and technology transfer in the area of
multimedia information systems. The staff's research interests include
Multimedia Information Systems, Very Large Data Bases, Multimedia Communication
Systems, Collaborative Environments, Information Retrieval, Human-Computer
Interaction, Electronic Commerce, Tourism and Cultural Systems and
Applications.
For this reason the laboratory
maintains strong links with other universities, research institutes and high
technology companies, all over the world, and actively participates (or has
participated) in numerous EU research and development projects (IST, ESPRIT,
ACTS, Leonardo Da Vinci, RACE, AIM, DELTA, LINGUA, INCO, STRIDE, SPA etc.).
A second activity is to train
graduate and undergraduate students of the Technical University of Crete in
advanced technology related to the area of Information Systems. Many members of
TUC are also associated with the Technical University of Crete and university
students have easy access to the advanced research facilities of TUC and to the
experience of its personnel.
A third area of TUC activities
consists of technology transfer and collaboration with leading Greek and
European companies. TUC has already established strong links with the leading
Greek forces in the area of communications and computer technology. These links
are maintained through joint participation in EU and National (competitive)
projects.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
UKOLN is a centre of expertise in digital information
management, providing advice and services to the library, information,
education and cultural heritage communities by:
·
Influencing policy and informing practice
·
Promoting community-building and consensus-making by
actively raising awareness
·
Advancing knowledge through research and development
·
Building innovative systems and services based on Web
technologies
·
Acting as an agent for knowledge transfer
Research
activity includes work on digital curation, institutional repositories,
terminologies, metadata, schemas and registries. Development activity focuses
on service-oriented architectures, development of innovative software
demonstrators, and advice on digital library standards and protocols. Guidance
is also given in areas of policy relating to semantic interoperability,
collection level descriptions, bibliographic management, accessibility and Web
use.
The Information Systems and Data Bases Division
of the Department of Informatics has broad and intense activity in most areas
of information systems and data base systems involving 10 faculty members. Of
particular relevance to DELOS is research in formal and methodological aspects
of conceptual modeling, information integration and interoperability, faceted
ontologies, term composition, model mapping, semantic similarity, sense disambiguation,
concept extraction, temporal aspects of document ranking, question answering
systems and NLP techniques for IR, and semantically extended web services. A DL
working group has been formed by 4 faculty members of the Division. Close
collaboration with FORTH. Until the beginning of 2004 Constantopoulos has led
the Information Systems Lab of FORTH and its participation in DELOS 1 and in
preparing for DELOS 2.
The Hypermedia Research Unit has a track record in hypermedia and
knowledge organisation systems, projects including semantic hypermedia and
spatial ontologies, with three PhDs awarded in this area. The EPSRC-funded
FACET project investigated the automatic expansion of faceted search queries,
using the semantic relationships inherent in a thesaurus. The project was in
collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Trust, who provided the Art and
Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) - the primary thesaurus used in the project, and
the UK National Museum of Science and Industry (NMSI). An extract of the NMSI
Collections Database acted as a test-bed for the project. The EPSRC’s final
assessment rated the project as 'Outstanding' in Communication of Research
Outputs and Cost Effectiveness ('Tending to Outstanding' overall). A case study
of the project was featured in a recent thematic issue of the EC project
DigiCult, a technology watch for cultural and scientific heritage.
http://www.unimi.it/engl/
http://dakwe.dico.unimi.it/
Our
research activities cross the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Database
Systems, and Mobile Computing. Reasoning techniques and well-founded logical
approaches are applied to data and knowledge management. A theoretical line of
research investigates time related aspects in data and knowledge management. A
more applicative line of research investigates the application of
knowledge-based techniques to different problems in mobile computing.
ACM. (1998) ACM
Computing Classification System. Available at: http://www.acm.org/class/1998/
Arapi, P. , Moumoutzis,
N. & Christodoulakis, S. (2005). DELOS WP5 -Task 5.4 : Interoperability of
eLearning applications with AV digital libraries. Working Draft. 11th June 2005
Baker, T., Dekkers, M.,
Heery, R., Patel, M. & Salokhe, G. (2001). What terms does your metadata
use? Application profiles as machine-understandable narratives. Journal of
Digital Information, Vol.2, No.2. Available at: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i02/Baker/baker-final.pdf
Bloom, B.S. & Krathwohl, D.R. (1965). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational
Goals: Handbook I, Cognitive Domain. Longman, New York
Capuano, N., Gaeta,
M., Lannone, R. & Orciuoli, F. (2005). Learning Design and
run-time resource binding in a distributed e-learning environment. Proceedings
of the 1st International Kaleidoscope Learning Grid SIG Workshop on
Distributed e-Learning Environments. Vico Equense (Naples), Italy, 14 March
2005
Christodoulakis, S.,
Arapi, P., Moumoutzis, N., Patel, M., Kapidakis, S., Arahova, A., Bountouri, L.
(2005). Interoperability of eLearning Applications with Audiovisual Digital
Libraries. DELOS poster session in conjunction with ECDL 2005, September 2005,
Vienna, Austria
ELENA Project. Available
at: http://www.elena-project.org/en/index.asp?p=1-1
Heery, R. & Patel,
M. (2004). Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas. Ariadne,
No. 25, September, last updated October 04, 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/intro.html
Hummel, H. G. K.,
Manderveld, J. M., Tattersall, C. & Koper, E. J. R. (2004). Educational
Modelling Language and Learning Design: new opportunities for instructional
reusability and personalised learning. Int. J. Learning Technology, 1(1), pp. 111-126
IEEE LOM. (2002) IEEE
1484.12.1-2002 Learning Object Metadata Standard. Available at: http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/
IEEE PAPI. (2002).
Personal and Private Information (PAPI), Draft 8 Specification. Available at:
http://edutool.com/papi
IMS DRI. (2003). IMS
Digital Repositories specification V1.0. Available at:
http://www.imsglobal.org/digitalrepositories/
IMS LD. (2003).
IMS Learning Design specification V1.0. Available at: http://www.imsglobal.org/learningdesign/index.cfm
IMS LIP. (2005). IMS Learner Information Package Specification V1.0.1
Available at: http://www.imsglobal.org/profiles/
Jena Semantic Web
Framework, http://jena.sourceforge.net/
Keenoy, K., Levene, M. & Peterson, D. (2004). SeLeNe –Self
E-Learning Networks (IST-2001-39045); WP4 Deliverable 4.2, Personalisation and
Trails in Self e-Learning Networks, Jan 2004
McLean, N. (2004). The
Ecology of Repository Services: A Cosmic View. Keynote Address. 8th European
Digital Library Conference ECDL 2004. UK
METS. (2005). Metadata
Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Official Website. Available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/
MPEG7. (2001). ISO/IEC
JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11/N3966, Text of 15938-5 FCD Information Technology –
Multimedia Content Description Interface – Part 5 Multimedia Description
Schemes. MPEG Group, Singapore 2001
MPEG7. (2003). ISO/IEC
JTC1/SC29/WG11N5525 MPEG-7 Overview (version 9). International Organisation for
Standardisation (ISO), Martines, J. (Ed.), Pattaya 2003. Available at: http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm
OWL. (2004) Web Ontology
Language (OWL). Available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/
Prud'hommeaux, E.&
Seaborne, A. (2005). SPARQL Query Language for RDF, W3C Working Draft, 23 Nov.
2005
SCORM. (2004). Sharable
Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 2004 2nd edition. Available at: http://www.adlnet.org
Tsinaraki, C.,
Polydoros, P., Christodoulakis, S (2004). Integration of OWL ontologies in
MPEG-7 and TVAnytime compliant Semantic Indexing, CAiSE 2004
