It would be useful to build a Semantic Web system for modelling and education mainly in the engineering and science fields. This would involve enabling a Semantic Web modelling infrastructure that could be the basis of future research in learning systems. In order to achieve these aims applications could be invesitgated and reviewed that assist in model building. The system created would also be used to promote engineering to a skeptical public who see the profession as poorly paid and dirty, (House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology report science and society), and remote from the public (Canavan et al).
E-Learning Research Area - The aim of this research is to try to bring together the areas of E-Learning, End-User Programming and the Semantic Web. So to achieve this, the area marked in yellow is examined.
With the development of technologies under the broad terms of Semantic Web and Web 2.0 there are opportunities to establish a highly interactive web based learning environment. The constructionist approach to understanding problems is to learn about them by modelling them. This approach can be used in combination with research into enabling end user programming techniques for modelling in order to provide an environment for non programmers to model their problems. Visualisation and interaction will provide rapid feedback that gives a powerful representation of the environment to be modelled.
Many people would like to make greater use of computer technology but are hampered by the need to learn programming languages if they are to fully interact with software. Instead they are limited to the use of certain features that are provided for them. A further constraint is the cost of software, and for this project we will develop free software and encourage a community of end-user developers, and modellers.
The aim is to create a software development environment that enables people to customise their own software solution. This is an alternative to provision of software as a finished article that can't be changed. It is intended that the learning software can be customised without requiring programming expertise.
This research will be part of our co-ordinated efforts to enable end-user programming for knowledge management (including e-learning), modelling and decision support, and simulation. Therefore the research proposed in this bid will concentrate mainly on translation for knowledge management and enabling academics and students to create e-learning systems. This is illustrated in the figure below.
The intention is to create an online community that can provide free software for modelling and education. The advantages of open source collaboration are that as well as allowing researchers to co-operate and work together where they share an interest; it will also allow the untapped potential to be developed of those who do not have an official research position. This includes students, people employed outside the academic environment, retired people and amateurs who have useful expertise. Astronomy, for example, has harnessed skills of this very diverse range of people to make new discoveries (Mutchler and Schenk). The expertise provided by anyone involved would be in providing feedback on usefulness, or ease of use of software, as well as actual involvement in software development. This means feedback would be sought from users of software even if they were not software experts. Meetings and forums could be arranged, both for web based and real world participation. Researchers would benefit the community by providing modelling and education tools online and for libraries. This is different from other open source communities in that the software could be easier to use and develop, and so involve those who have not previously been capable of participating in software development.
It is important to provide an alternative way of representing models, which does not require the user to write code. The tool created must make it easy to interact with and change the models, and easy to share information with others. This can also involve use of editing tools such as wikis (Protégé Community Wiki),(Vanguard Software Modelling Wiki), (Visual Knowledge), blogs, and semantic web editors (Amaya),(Quint, V., Vatton, 2004 and 2005) to allow discussion and explanation of the models.
There is an urgent need for Semantic Web tools to illustrate the benefits this technology can provide for education, this paper (EASE: The European Association Semantic Web Education) (Diederich et al) explains this need. There is also a need for education in the use of Semantic Web technologies for industry. Some Semantic Web tools are available, explained by EASE and in the (Jena User Conference) or being developed at present, but they are still difficult for people to make use of as they take a good deal of development expertise. REASE (the repository of EASE for learning units) provides a way to find and create learning materials for industrial applications of Semantic Web technologies.
References
Select Committee on Science and Technology Third Report Chapter 2: Public Attitudes and Values - Attitudes to engineering 2.39 - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldselect/ldsctech/38/3804.htm.
Canavan B, Magill J, Love D, A Study of the Factors Affecting Perception of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) in Young People (2002), International Conference on Engineering Education, August 18-21, 2002, Manchester, U.K.
Amaya, 2007. Welcome to Amaya - W3C's Editor/Browser http://www.w3.org/Amaya/.
Diederich, J, Nejdl, W, Tolksdorf R, 2006, EASE: The European Association for SemanticWeb Education, SWET2006 Beijing, China.
Jena User Conference, 2006, Bristol, UK - http://blog.myspace.com/UK%20http://jena.hpl.hp.com/juc2006/proceedings.html - Proceedings (2006).
Mutchler M, Schenk H, Amateur Astronomers and the Hubble Space Telescope - http://www-int.stsci.edu/~mutchler/amateur.html.
Protégé Community Wiki - User Driven Progamming - http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UserDrivenProgramming.
Quint, V., Vatton, I., 2004. Techniques for Authoring Complex XML Documents, In: DocEng 2004 - ACM Symposium on Document Engineering Milwaukee October 28-30 http://wam.inrialpes.fr/publications/2004/DocEng2004VQIV.html.
Quint, V., Vatton, I., 2005. Towards Active Web Clients, In: DocEng 2005 - ACM Symposium on Document Engineering Bristol United Kingdom 2-4 November 2005 - http://wam.inrialpes.fr/publications/2004/DocEng2004VQIV.html.
REASE the repository of EASE for learning units http://ubp.l3s.uni-hannover.de/ubp.
Vanguard Software Modelling Wiki - http://wiki.vanguardsw.com/bin/browse.dsb?dir/Engineering/Aerospace/ - Engineering - Aerospace
Visual Knowledge - http://www.visualknowledge.com/ - Semantic Wiki.
My pages on this subject
My Home Page is - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/.
My E-Learning Page is - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning.htm.
My Semantic Web Page is - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/RDF/RDF.htm.
