1. Perspectives on Semantic
Technologies for Education
6+1 topics
Thanassis Tiropanis, Hugh Davis, Dave Millard, Mark Weal, Su White, Gary Wills
Asma Ounnas, Marcus Ramsden, Faith Lawrens, Heather S. Packer, Daniel A. Smith
www.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk

2. SemTech
• JISC-funded project working with CETIS
• Objectives:
Survey of semantic tools and services
Current adoption of semantic technologies in the UK higher
education
Roadmap of semantic technology adoption in the next 5 years
• www.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk

3. Acknowledgements
The SemTech team: The JISC CETIS Semantic The SemTech workshop
Hugh Davis Technology Working Group: participants:
Sheila MacNeill (CETIS) Colin Allison (University of St.
Faith Lawrens Andrews)
David Millard Lorna Campbell (CETIS)
Chris Bailey (University of Bristol)
Phil Barker (CETIS)
Asma Ounnas Helen Beetham
Liliana Cabral (Knowledge Media
Heather S. Packer Institute, Open University)
Simon Buckingham-Shum (Open Patrick Carmichael (University of
Marcus Ramsden University, UK) Cambridge)
Daniel A. Smith David Davies (University of Warwick) Tom Franklin (Franklin
Thanassis Tiropanis Michael Gardner (University Essex) Consulting)
Mark Weal Tony Linde (University of Leicester) David Kay (Sero Consulting)
Wilbert Kraan (CETIS) George Magoulas (London
Su White Knowledge Lab, Birkbeck College)
Sue Manuel (University of
Gary Wills Loughborough)
Uma Patel (City University)
Learning Societies Lab Alex Poulovassilis (London
Lou McGill Knowledge Lab, Birkbeck College)
Graham Wilson (LT Scotland) John Scott (University of Essex)
(ECS-University of Robin Wylie (LT Scotland)
Southampton) David Kernohan (JISC)

4. What are semantic technologies?

5. semantic tech in edu scenario?
Agreed
Ontologies
learning content
discovery
Metadata
personalisation
& adaptation
Learning
Content
A top-down approach

6. semantic tech in a web 2.0 world
• Soft semantics
‣ Meaning in formats that humans can process
‣ Lightweight knowledge modelling in Web 2.0 applications
• Hard semantics
‣ Meaning in formats that machines can process
‣ Processing is independent of domain specific schemas

7. What is the value of Semantic
Technologies in HE?

8. Is it time to re-think the value of
semantic technologies in HE?
• Web 2.0 promise for content generation annotation
• Value of lightweight knowledge modelling and reasoning
• The HE institutional challenges
• The learning and teaching challenges
• Linked data movement and the Web of data

9. HE institutional perspective
• Visibility of degree programmes and research output of HE
institutions
• Curriculum design
• Recruitment and retention of students
• Efficiency of accreditation
• Collaboration across departments and institutions through workflows
• Integration of knowledge capital, cross-curricular initiatives
• Transparency of data held by educational institutions

10. learning and teaching perspective
• Course creation and delivery workflows
• Group formation for learning and teaching activities
• Critical thinking and argumentation support
• Personal and group knowledge space construction
• Assessment, certification and addressing of plagiarism

11. What semantic technologies are
there?

12. surveyed semantic technologies
semtech-survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Collaborative
Searching and
Authoring and
Matching
Annotation
Infrastructural
Repositories, VLEs Technologies for
and Authoring tools Linked Data and
Semantic Enrichment

13. Collaborative Authoring and
Annotation Tools
Mymory
Unobtrusive user observation
Meaning co-ordination
Annotation of resource sections
Compendium
Visualisation of arguments
Collaborative domain modelling
Real time meeting capture

14. Searching and Matching tools
Arnetminer
Find experts
Associations between experts
Mining RDF from existing repositories
LUISA
Discovery, selection, negotiation and
composition of LOs
Annotation techniques
Use of Semantic Web Services

15. Repositories, VLEs, Annotation tools
Freebase
Collaboratively authored, open
repository of structured topics
Topics mined from other repositories
Accessible via open APIs
SKUA
Distributed network of semantically
aware shared annotation services in
the form of RDF stores
Support for user-facing applications

16. Infrastructural Technologies
RKBExplorer D2R Server
Konduit
Virtuoso

17. What is the value of semantic
technologies, really?

18. questions following the survey
• Where are the education specific users in these applications?
• What is the use of ontologies in surveyed applications?
• Where is the value of reasoning in surveyed applications?
• What is the value of semantic technologies in practice?

19. surveyed semantic tech use
Wiki
• Actors: Tagging
Blog/Electronic Journal
Teacher Shared Bookmarking
Student RDF
Assessor/Examiner
University Administrator OWL
System Administrator FOAF
Other Administrator
Program/Module Co-ordinator SKOS
Admissions Team
Automated System
Triple Store
Researcher Ontology/Taxonomy
Archive/Repository

20. surveyed learning activity use
• Collaborative activities • T&L activities involving the
Team Building individual
Computer Mediated Information Gathering
Discussion Information Handling
Computer Mediated Experimentation
Role Play Information Publishing
Content Creation Simulation
Content Annotation Experiments

21. Deliberation

22. insights
• Most of the identified HE challenges can be addressed by querying
across institutional repositories (databases, web pages, VLEs)
• Significant learning and teaching challenges can be addressed by
accessing resources across departments, schools, institutions
• Argumentation and critical thinking could benefit from advanced
reasoning over a large scale of resources
• Could we adopt a bottom-up approach starting from linked data which
can be related to (layers of) ontologies later in the context of specific
applications?
➡ VALUE IN A LINKED DATA FIELD ACROSS HE

23. breadth vs. depth
• The value of semantic technologies on a large scale needs to be
investigated
- In addition to the value of reasoning using ontologies
• Mapping a critical volume of linked data to expressive ontologies
can be promising
• Encouragement for community-agreed ontologies can be more
effective and flexible
• Expressive semantics to enable pedagogy-aware applications over a
large volume of linked data can be meaningful in a Web 2.0+ world

24. The road ahead?

25. a roadmap of sem tech adoption

26. a roadmap of sem tech adoption
• Stage 1
‣ Exposing internal repositories as linked data, Performance optimised triple stores
‣ Searching across repositories, matching students, teachers, curricula, research interests
• Stage 2
‣ Advanced searching and matching, argumentation and critical thinking applications
‣ Mapping linked data to application-wide or community-wide agreed ontologies
• Stage 3
‣ Collaborative semantic enrichment of linked data relevant to communities
‣ Pedagogy aware reasoning applications and services

27. the network effect
• HE institutions exposing relational databases, VLE material, Web pages as
linked data
‣ Relevant technologies: RDF, RDFa, VLE plugins
‣ Starting from information already available in (X)HTML!
• Applications that use exposed linked data across institutions
‣ Curriculum design or alignment
‣ Inline recommendation of resources or people
‣ Applications that map linked data to community agreed or idiosyncratic
ontologies for critical thinking, argumentation, ...

28. The first 100 weeks?

29. first 100 weeks?
• HE institutional, learning & teaching challenges:
• What information has been/can be used to address them?
• Where can this information be found in institutional repositories?
• How does this information differ across disciplines?
• Can this information be aligned across the HE sector?
• Can this information be related to other open repositories?
• What are the institutional barriers?

30. first 100 weeks?
• Requirements of a linked data infrastructure for HE?
• Affordances of linked data repositories for the scale of HE?
• Query language requirements to support relevant queries?
• Interoperability with institutional repositories
• databases, VLEs, web pages, XML documents, ...
• Authenticity and integrity of HE resources?
• Confidentiality requirements? Anonymisation?
• Interoperability with existing open repositories, knowledge models

31. Thank you!
Thanassis Tiropanis - tt2@ecs.soton.ac.uk
The project: semtech-survey.ecs.soton.ac.uk
The survey: www.semtech.ecs.soton.ac.uk
The workshop: www.semhe.org