Andrea Kohlhase

Semantic Knowledge Management for Education

ldquoSemantic technologiesrdquo are touted as the next big wave in educational technology and as the solution to many problems in this arena. Interdisciplinary work between the fields of knowledge management (KM) and educational technology (ET) is booming. But the crop of actual systems and semantically enhanced learning objects is still meager, maybe because KM and EL are lacking a consensus on the underlying notions, e.g., of ldquosemantics,rdquo yielding specific problems in their interplay. In this paper, we look at semantic educational technologies and draw conclusions for their approach in KM. In particular, we (re)evaluate the notions of semantics, knowledge, and learning; their role for learning materials in ET; and how they interact with the contexts involved in the learning/teaching process. Based on this, we distill a list of conditions the underlying knowledge representation format must fulfil to support these. As these conditions are still rather abstract, we show how they can be realized in a concrete language design, taking in our open mathematical documents format OMDoc as a point of departure.

S T E X +: a system for flexible formalization of linked data

We present the S^TE^X+ system, a user-driven advancement of S^TE^X --- a semantic extension of LAT_EX that allows for producing high-quality PDF documents for (proof)reading and printing, as well as semantic XML/OMDoc documents for the Web or further processing. Originally S^TE^X had been created as an invasive, semantic frontend for authoring XML documents. Here, we used S^TE^X in a Software Engineering case study as a formalization tool. In order to deal with modular pre-semantic vocabularies and relations, we upgraded it to S^TE^X+ in a participatory design process. We present a tool chain that starts with an S^TE^X+ editor and ultimately serves the generated documents as XHTML+RDFa Linked Data via an OMDoc-enabled, versioned XML database. In the final output, all structural annotations are preserved in order to enable semantic information retrieval services.

CPoint: Dissolving the Author’s Dilemma

Automated knowledge management techniques critically depend on the availability of semantically enhanced documents which are hard to come by in practice. Starting from a detailed look at the motivations of users to produce semantic data, we argue that the authoring problem experienced by MKM is actually an author’s dilemma. An analysis of the content authoring process suggests that the dilemma can partially be overcome by providing authoring tools like invasive editors aimed specifically at supporting the content creator. We present the CPoint application, a semantic, invasive editor for Microsoft PowerPoint, geared towards the OMDoc MKM format.

The Planetary System: Web 3.0 & Active Documents for STEM

Abstract In this paper we present the Active Documents Paradigm (semantically annotated documents associated with a content commons that holds the corresponding background ontologies) and the Planetary system (as an active document player). We show that the current Planetary system gives a solid foundation and can be extended modularly to address most of the criteria of the Executable Papers Challenge.

Compensating the Computational Bias of Spreadsheets with MKM Techniques

Spreadsheets are mathematical documents that are heavily employed in administration, financial forecasting, education, and science because of their intuitive, flexible, and direct approach to computation. In this paper we show that spreadsheets are interesting applications for MKM techniques which can alleviate usability and maintenance problems as spreadsheet-based applications grow evermore complex and long-lived. We present the software and information architecture of a semantic enhancement of MS Excel spreadsheets that aims at compensating the computational bias in spreadsheets.

Communities of practice in MKM: an extensional model

We explore the social context of mathematical knowledge: Even though, the community of mathematicians may look homogeneous from the outside, it is actually structured into various sub-communities that differ in preferred notations, the choice of basic assumptions, or e.g. in the choice of motivating examples. We contend that we cannot manage mathematical knowledge for human recipients if we do not take these factors into account. As a basis for a future extension of MKM systems, we analyze the social context of information in terms of Communities of Practice (CoP; a concept from learning theory) and present a concrete extensional model for CoPs in mathematics.

Spreadsheet Interaction with Frames: Exploring a Mathematical Practice

Since Mathematics really is about what mathematicians do, in this paper, we will look at the mathematical practice of framing , in which an object of interest is viewed in terms of well-understood mathematical structures. The new perspective not only allows to deepen the understanding of a resp. object, it also facilitates new insights. We propose a model for framing in the context of theory graphs, and show how framing can be exploited to enhance the interaction with MKM systems. We use the framing extension of our SACHS system -- a semantic help system for MS Excel -- as a concrete example.

Search Interfaces for Mathematicians

Access to mathematical knowledge has changed dramatically in recent years, therefore changing mathematical search practices. Our aim with this study is to scrutinize professional mathematicians’ search behavior. With this understanding we want to be able to reason why mathematicians use which tool for what search problem in what phase of the search process. To gain these insights we conducted 24 repertory grid interviews with mathematically inclined people (ranging from senior professional mathematicians to non-mathematicians). From the interview data we elicited patterns for the user group “mathematicians” that can be applied when understanding design issues or creating new designs for mathematical search interfaces.

An exploration in the space of mathematical knowledge

Although knowledge is a central topic for MKM there is little explicit discussion on what ‘knowledge’ might actually be. There are specific intuitions about form and content of knowledge, about its structure, and epistemological nature that shape the MKM systems, but a conceptual model is missing. In this paper we try to rationalize this discussion to give MKM a firmer footing, to start a discussion among MKM researchers and help relate the MKM intuitions and discourses to other communities. Starting from the observation that many concrete realizations of mathematical knowledge objects are considered equivalent, we propose a conceptual model of the space of (mathematical) knowledge objects graded by levels of abstraction and presentational explicitness and draw conclusions for MKM markup formats.

Human-Spreadsheet Interaction

Spreadsheets have become very popular tools for analyzing and visualizing data from business and science. To better understand human-spreadsheet interaction, we explore readers’ information models, but in contrast to most studies we focus on spreadsheet readers rather than spreadsheet authors. We conducted a study using the repertory grid technique and analyzed the result with the help of a Generalized Procrustes Analysis yielding a deeper understanding of human’s information model of spreadsheets. Based on this we envision new human-spreadsheet interactions to increase the readibility and thus, usability of spreadsheets.