If you use Friend of a Friend (FOAF) files to describe your profile and want to provide it to the reader in a readable way FOAF.Vix is a perfect service. Let me cite the description created by its authors:
FOAF.Vix is a visualizer and relation explorer for FOAF (Friend of a Friend) files. Although this file format is designed first of all to be machine readable, it is often desirable to be able to browse it as if it were a usual Web page. FOAF.Vix gives you this possibility, presenting the data from a FOAF file in an easy to understand form and allowing to follow links to other Web resources it contains, including links to other FOAF pages, thereby allowing you to explore the network of human relations.
Only recently, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to fully understand the potential of eLearning and have concentrated on new tools and technologies for creating, capturing and distributing knowledge. Focusing on the area of informal learning, this paper describes this emerging domain and assesses current semantic and Web 2.0 tools used in this field. Contributing to the body of research, the limitations of both sets of technologies are documented highlighting areas of definite improvement. Finally, semantic web harvesting technology as a solution is explored in the form of the IKHarvester tool.
As you’ve probably noticed, quite a few posts on my blog are directly related to eLearning, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. Yet, “Social Semantic Information Sources for eLearning” is the topic of my Master’s Thesis. This is the main area for the research I do in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).
I’ve already mentioned of two my (and others) articles related to that topic:
Adapting informal sources of knowledge to e-Learning.
The amount of information sources and the available data is growing dramatically fast nowadays. It is very difficult time for teachers to keep up with changes, especially in information domain, and to find new and appropriate sources of information; this problem also affects e-Learning. Contemporary e-Learning systems deliver predefined, rigid courses which usually do not take into account user specific conditions, like wishing to broaden his or her knowledge in wide range of domains at the same time. Without constant maintenance, electronic courses are also getting outdated. Moreover, all of the current solutions seem to underestimate the potential of informal learning [1].
According to researches, over eighty per cent of possessed knowledge is acquired from informal sources of information like wikis, blogs and digital libraries [1]. These Web 2.0 platforms allow community to collaborate, share knowledge and ideas; in addition, these services are continuously developed to serve the users better. Semantic description of available sources not only interconnects them but also allows machines to reason about their content. Consequently, artifacts can be easily accessed, browsed and harvested for further use.
Following the presented idea, we introduce Didaskon [2], a framework for automated composition of a learning path for a student. The selection and workflow scheduling of learning objects is based on their description, semantically annotated specification of user profiles, anticipated knowledge after course completion, and technical details of the clientâs platform. User profile is described with FOAFRealm Ontology [3]; it is based on FOAF metadata that provides functionality to manage identities and share resources with friends.
Having in mind statistics about acquiring knowledge, Didaskon derives both from formal and informal sources of information. It collects relevant data from wikis or blogs and process them so that they can be used in a form of learning objects; it enriches and improves the process of learning.
The title of the article is “E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources”. In general, it relates to eLearning, Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. We propose a way of utilizing social tools for eLearning purposes.
Here you have the abstract:
“E-Learning on the Social Semantic Information Sources”
E-Learning grows on the fertile soil of the Internet technologies; it fails, however, to reach their full potential. With new, emerging technologies of the second generation Internet there is even more to be captured and adopted: knowledge sharing with blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking services. In this article we argue that those technologies can be adapted to improve user experience in e-Learning; we present an online social bookmarking system called social semantic collaborative filtering. SSCF supports SIOC metadata which ultimately transforms it in to a browser of blogs, fora, and other community sites. We show how a digital library system, such as JeromeDL, utilizing this technology can be used in the e-Learning process, which takes advantage of recent research in the Internet.
Notitio.us is service for collaborative knowledge aggregation and sharing. It employs IKHarvester for retrieving RDF information about Web resources bookmarked by the users. Therefore, it is capable of indexing rich metadata, coming from various types of resources.
In contrary to bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, notitio.us keeps rich, semantically interconnected metadata shared by the users using Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering. The resources not only can be shared with a bookmarking interface (SSCF), but also, based on the rich metadata, they can be searched and browsed using TagsTreeMaps, a tags browser based on treemaps rendering algorithm, and MultiBeeBrowse, a collaborative browsing components. These components improve user browsing experience, utilizing metadata delivered by IKHarvester.
One of modules delivered by IKHarvester allows to expose aggregated metadata in LOM standard, which turns notitio.us
into a valuable source of learning objects based on informal knowledge, delivered by IKHarvester.
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Remember my previous post about IKHarvester. There, Iâve briefly described how I collect metadata for blog posts which support SIOC. Then, I thought itâs a good idea to describe in one place what really IKHarvester is and how it works.
IKHarvester (Informal Knowledge Harvester) is a web service that characterizes with two core features: harvesting data, and providing it for eLearning frameworks. It benefits from the Semantic Web core postulate that demands rich descriptions of resource available online. Thus, the content of web pages is understandable not only with machines but also by machines.
Firefox is a powerful web browser; it’s popular since it’s free and offers a great many add-ons and plugins that enhance its capabilities. I decided to present a set of add-ons I use and find useful. They are groupped in a few categories, which facilitates browsing. Continue reading ‘Firefox add-ons’
Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Search
Author
Jarosław Dobrzański
I'm a software engineer at Kainos Software Ltd.
Most of all, I like travelling and photograhy.
For more details about me, read my profile.
Me online:
About
You are currently browsing the Blinded by the lights weblog archives for the semanticweb category.
Image via Wikipedia
So have a look at my readable FOAF profile
