Bram Vandeputte

The Ariadne Infrastructure for Managing and Storing Metadata

Reusing digital resources for learning has been a goal for several decades, driven by potential time savings and quality enhancements. Although the rapid development of Web-based learning has increased opportunities for reuse significantly, managing learning objects and making them accessible still entails many challenges. This article presents and analyzes the standards-based Ariadne infrastructure for managing learning objects in an open and scalable architecture. The architecture supports the integration of learning objects in multiple, distributed repository networks. The authors capture lessons learned in four architectural patterns.

On the use of learning object metadata: the GLOBE experience

Since IEEE LTSC LOM was published in 2002, it is one of the widest adopted standard for the description of educational resources. The GLOBE (Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange) alliance enables share and reuse between several Learning Object Repositories worldwide. Being the largest and more diverse collection of Learning Object Metadata, it is an ideal place to perform an analysis of the actual use of the LOM standard in the real world. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the use and quality of 630.317 metadata instances.

Components of a research 2.0 infrastructure

In this paper, we investigate the components of a Research 2.0 infrastructure. We propose building blocks and their concrete implementation to leverage Research 2.0 practice and technologies in our field, including a publication feed format for exchanging publication data, a RESTful API to retrieve publication and Web 2.0 data, and a publisher suit for refining and aggregating data. We illustrate the use of this infrastructure with Research 2.0 application examples ranging from a Mash-Up environment, a mobile and multitouch application, thereby demonstrating the strength of this infrastructure.

Interactive sensemaking in authorship networks

This paper describes research on rich opportunities for novel interaction on large multitouch tables to assist researchers. We have designed, developed and evaluated ResearchTable which provides an interactive visualization of (co-)authorship networks. Our evaluation shows that users discovered relevant researchers and papers that they were unaware of.

Applying design strategies in publication networks: a case study

This case study shows how following two different designs strategies (Overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand [8] and Start from what you know, then grow [5]) influences the sensemaking behavior [6] of users in the context of science2.0 [9]. To this end, we have designed, developed and evaluated two multi touch applications that provide interactive visualizations of authorship networks. Overview first steers people towards structural insight and overview sensemaking, while Start from what you know invites users to use topical information to explore the data.