Estrella Pulido

Dynamic generation of adaptive Internet-based courses

In this paper we describe a new approach for developing adaptive Web based courses. These courses are defined by means of teaching tasks which correspond to basic knowledge units, and rules which describe how teaching tasks are divided into subtasks. Both tasks and rules are used at execution time to guide the students during their learning process by determining the set of achievable tasks to be presented to the student at every step. Adaptivity is implemented by presenting students with different HTML pages depending on their profile, their previous actions, and the active learning strategy. The HTML pages presented to the students are generated dynamically from general information about the type of media elements associated to each task and their layout. The whole approach is exemplified by means of a course on traffic signs.

Neptuno: Semantic Web Technologies for a Digital Newspaper Archive

Newspaper archives are a fundamental working tool for editorial teams. Their exploitation in digital format through the web, and the provision of technology to make this possible, are also important businesses today. The volume of archive contents, and the complexity of human teams that create and maintain them, give rise to diverse management difficulties. We propose the introduction of the emergent semantic-based technologies to improve the processes of creation, maintenance, and exploitation of the digital archive of a newspaper. We describe a platform based on these technologies, that consists of a) a knowledge base associated to the newspaper archive, based on an ontology for the description of journalistic information, b) a semantic search module, and c) a module for content browsing and visualisation based on ontologies.

Semiautomatic Generation of Web Courses by Means of an Object-Oriented Simulation Language

This paper describes the procedure we have used to semiautomatically generate three different courses for the Web. The simulations used in these courses have been written in our special-purpose object-oriented continuous simulation language (OOCSMP). A compiler we have written for this language automati cally generates Java code and HTML pages, which must be completed manually with the text and images associated to each.

Using virtual worlds for behaviour clustering-based analysis

Virtual Worlds have become a very popular domain and its high inmersive characteristics can be used to extract information about the avatars behaviour. In this kind of environment it is possible to obtain interesting data about avatars, such as their exact position in the world, what they are looking at (eye-gazing) or what they are talking about. This paper studies how this information, obtained from avatars interactions, can be integrated in order to apply clustering techniques. Monitoring avatars in a virtual world is a useful task that allows the identification of behavioral groups. The meaning of these groups depends on the application domain, for example in educational virtual worlds, they can represent whether students are paying attention to the teachers explanation or not.

Newspaper Archives on the Semantic Web

The introduction of information technologies in the news industry has marked a new evolutionary cycle in the journalistic activity. The creation of new infrastructures, protocols and exchange standards for the automatic or on-demand distribution and/or sale of information packages through dif-ferent channels and transmission formats has deeply transformed the way in which news industry players communicate with each other. One inter-esting consequence of this technological transformation has been the emergence, in very few years, of a whole new market of online services for archive news redistribution, syndication, aggregation, and brokering. Newspaper archives are a highly valuable information asset for the widest range of information consumer profiles: students, researchers, historians, business professionals, the general public, and not the least, news writers themselves. Providing technology for news archive construction, manage-ment, access, publication, and billing, is an important business nowadays. The information collected from everyday news is huge in volume, very loosely organized, and grows without a global a-priori structure. This ever-growing corpus of archived news results from the coordinated but to much extent autonomous work of a team of reporters, whose primary goal is not to build an archive, but to serve the best possible information product for

Using preferences to solve student-class allocation problem

Resource allocation is a form of Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) in which a set of resources must be assigned to a set of agents. Multiagent Resource Allocation (MARA) makes possible solving CSP using qualitative parameters as, for example, reduce idle time in scheduling or preferences over the set of resources to be allocated. In this paper, we are going to use a MARA approach to find a solution to the student-class allocation problem, where each class has a number of seats, each student has his preferences over the schedule and the institution requests a uniform distribution of the students in classes and some other rules.

Improving Web-Site Maintenance with TANGOW by Making Page Structure and Contents Independent

In this paper we discuss how Web site maintenance can be improved by making page structure and contents independent. This is the principle used in TANGOW (Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the Web) for designing and maintaining Web-sites. In TANGOW, the information structure and contents are managed independently, what facilitates the maintenance tasks. It also allows the specification of a common design pattern for all the final HTML pages, which the system dynamically generates starting from static HTML pieces. In the first section we introduce some common issues and problems in Web-site development. The TANGOW system is presented in the second section, focusing on those characteristics that make it useful for the development of Web-sites. Based on a real world example, the next section shows how TANGOW helps to solve the problems mentioned in section 1. Finally, some conclusions are taken from the described application

How Adaptivity Affects the Development of TANGOW Web-Based Courses

In this paper we describe those aspects a designer has to take into account when designing Web-based adaptive courses with TANGOW. The discussion is specifically focused on the adaptivity issues, which are not covered by any standard design methodology. The first section describes the decisions that need to be made in order to create adaptive courses by using TANGOW. Work done on some approaches to facilitate the design of Web courses is presented next. The paper finishes with some conclusions and work in progress.

Database Query Evaluation with the STARBASE Method

This paper presents STARBASE, a new method for database query evaluation which compares favourably with existing methods in power, performance and applicability. STARBASE advances the state of the art in deductive database technology by providing an automatic method for reordering the literals in the body of a rule so that the next literal to be processed is guaranteed to be one of the most instantiated ones. Being graph-based, STARBASE demonstrates for the first time that graphical methods can compete with resolution-based methods in power and performance. he paper describes a prototype implementation of a STARBASE system consisting of (1) an optimising rule compiler which transforms rules into optimal path specifications, and (2) an evaluation algorithm which uses the path specifications relevant to a given query to find all matching subgraphs in the database. Performance is compared to XSB and CORAL for a range of examples. The prototype implementation is restricted to Datalog programs, but can be extended to stratified programs. The main features of STARBASE which guarantee high performance are (1) it focuses on data relevant to the query, (2) it avoids redundant computation and looping by storing partial results, and (3) it replaces subsumption checking (NP complete) with syntactic equality checking (logarithmic).

Recursive query processing using graph traversal techniques

This paper presents STARBASE, n new algorithm for recursive querypmcessittgondeductivedatabasesbaaedon the Chart Parsing algorithm. It is distinct from the other applicationsof parsing to deduction, namely Eartey Deduction and Ftoaenblueth’s method, because it removes variabtes fmm literals snd extends the Chart Parsingengine to handte all possible variations in the pattern of arguments in the titerals of deduction rules. Like other tabling methods, STARBASE avoids redundant computation by storing and reusing partial results bu~ in contrast with tbetw it does not depend on subsumption and uses syntactic equality checking, instead. Because STARBASE takes a skmgly graph-oriented view of both the database and the deduction tules, the evaluation of a query on a database can be viewed as a process of traversing paths in the graph representing the database. A prototype of the STARBASE system has been implemented in the C language. Performance tesults show that STARBASE, even in prototype fo~ lies witbin the performance range of the most advanced existing systems.