Marek Hatala

Ontology-Based User Modeling in an Augmented Audio Reality System for Museums

Ubiquitous computing is a challenging area that allows us to further our understanding and techniques of context-aware and adaptive systems. Among the challenges is the general problem of capturing the larger context in interaction from the perspective of user modeling and human–computer interaction (HCI). The imperative to address this issue is great considering the emergence of ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. This paper provides an account of our addressing the specific problem of supporting functionality as well as the experience design issues related to museum visits through user modeling in combination with an audio augmented reality and tangible user interface system. This paper details our deployment and evaluation of ec(h)o – an augmented audio reality system for museums. We explore the possibility of supporting a context-aware adaptive system by linking environment, interaction objects and users at an abstract semantic level instead of at the content level. From the user modeling perspective ec(h)o is a knowledge-based recommender system. In this paper we present our findings from user testing and how our approach works well with an audio and tangible user interface within a ubiquitous computing system. We conclude by showing where further research is needed.

The interoperability of learning object repositories and services: standards, implementations and lessons learned

Interoperability is one of the main issues in creating a networked system of repositories. The eduSource project in its holisticapproach to building a network of learning object repositories in Canada is implementing an open network for learning services. Itsopenness is supported by a communication protocol called theeduSource Communications Layer (ECL) which closely implements the IMS Digital Repository Interoperability (DRI)specification and architecture. The ECL in conjunction withconnection middleware enables any service providers to join thenetwork. EduSource is open to external initiatives as it explicitlysupports an extensible bridging mechanism between eduSource and other major initiatives. This paper discusses interoperability in general and then focuses on the design of ECL as animplementation of IMS DRI with supporting infrastructure andmiddleware. The eduSource implementation is in the mature stateof its development as being deployed in different settings withdifferent partners. Two applications used in evaluating ourapproach are described: a gateway for connecting betweeneduSource and the NSDL initiative, and a federated searchconnecting eduSource, EdNA and SMETE.

Using Semantic Web Technologies to Analyze Learning Content

The authors demonstrate how to use semantic Web technologies to improve the state-of-the-art in online learning environments and bridge the gap between students on the one hand, and authors or teachers on the other. The ontological framework presented here helps formalize learning object context as a complex interplay of different learning-related elements and shows how we can use semantic annotation to interrelate diverse learning artifacts. On top of this framework, the authors implemented several feedback channels for educators to improve the delivery of future Web-based courses.

Situated play in a tangible interface and adaptive audio museum guide

This paper explores the design issues of situated play within a museum through the study of a museum guide prototype that integrates a tangible interface, audio display, and adaptive modeling. We discuss our use of design ethnography in order to situate our interaction and to investigate the liminal and engagement qualities of a museum visit. The paper provides an overview of our case study and analysis of our user evaluation. We discuss the implications including degrees of balance in the experience design of play in interaction; the challenge in developing a discovery-based information model, and the need for a better understanding of the contextual aspects of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). We conclude that learning effectiveness and functionality can be balanced productively with playful interaction through an adaptive audio and TUI if designers balance the engagement between play and the environment, and the space between imagination and interpretation that links the audio content to the artifacts.

Towards open ontology learning and filtering

Open ontology learning is the process of extracting a domain ontology from a knowledge source in an unsupervised way. Due to its unsupervised nature, it requires filtering mechanisms to rate the importance and correctness of the extracted knowledge. This paper presents OntoCmaps, a domain-independent and open ontology learning tool that extracts deep semantic representations from corpora. OntoCmaps generates rich conceptual representations in the form of concept maps and proposes an innovative filtering mechanism based on metrics from graph theory. Our results show that using metrics such as Betweenness, PageRank, Hits and Degree centrality outperforms the results of standard text-based metrics (TF-IDF, term frequency) for concept identification. We propose voting schemes based on these metrics that provide a good performance in relationship identification, which again provides better results (in terms of precision and F-measure) than other traditional metrics such as frequency of co-occurrences. The approach is evaluated against a gold standard and is compared to the ontology learning tool Text2Onto. The OntoCmaps generated ontology is more expressive than Text2Onto ontology especially in conceptual relationships and leads to better results in terms of precision, recall and F-measure.

Rules and ontologies in support of real-time ubiquitous application

The focus of this paper is the practical evaluation of the challenges and capabilities of combination of ontologies and rules in the context of realtime ubiquitous application. The ec(h)o project designed a platform to create a museum experience that consists of a physical installation and an interactive virtual layer of three-dimensional soundscapes that are physically mapped to the museum displays. The retrieval mechanism is built on the user model and conceptual descriptions of sound objects and museum artifacts. The rule-based user model was specifically designed to work in environments where the rich semantic descriptions are available. The retrieval criteria are represented as inference rules that combine knowledge from psychoacoustics and cognitive domains with compositional aspects of interaction. Evaluation results both from the laboratory and museum deployment testing are presented together with the end user usability evaluations. We also summarize our findings in the lessons learned that provide a transferable generic knowledge for similar type of applications. The ec(h)o proved that ontologies and rules provide an excellent platform for building a highly-responsive context-aware interactive application.

E-Learning meets the Social Semantic Web

The social semantic Web has recently emerged as a paradigm in which ontologies (aimed at defining, structuring and sharing information) and collaborative software (used for creating and sharing knowledge) have been merged together. Ontologies provide an effective means of capturing and integrating knowledge for feedback provisioning, while using collaborative activities can support pedagogical theories, such as social constructivism. Both technologies have developed separately in the e-learning domain; representing respectively a teacher-centered and a learner-centered approach for learning environments. In this paper we bridge the gap between these two approaches by leveraging the social semantic Web paradigm, and propose a collaborative semantic-rich learning environment in which folksonomies created from studentspsila collaborative tags contribute to ontology maintenance, and teacher-directed feedback.

The Social Semantic Web in Intelligent Learning Environments: state of the art and future challenges

Todays technology-enhanced learning practices cater to students and teachers who use many different learning tools and environments and are used to a paradigm of interaction derived from open, ubiquitous, and socially oriented services. In this context, a crucial issue for education systems in general, and for Intelligent Learning Environments (ILEs) in particular, is related to the ability of leveraging these new paradigms for creating, maintaining and sharing the knowledge that these systems embed. This will enable ILEs to benefit from shared information from disparate systems, which is related to learning content and student activities, so that the overall complexity of system development and maintenance would be reduced while at the same time improving the capability of personalization, context-awareness, and interaction. In this article, we investigate how the Social Semantic Web can be leveraged for enabling and easing this process. We first analyze each module of a typical ILE, showing how it can benefit from the Social Semantic Web paradigm and then proceed to investigate how this new paradigm can be leveraged for increasing interactivity level of ILEs.

Kurio: a museum guide for families

We discuss three design strategies for improving the quality of social interaction and learning with interactive museum guides: 1) embodied interaction; 2) game-learning; 3) a hybrid system. We used these strategies in our prototype Kurio, which is aimed at supporting families visiting museums. The results of our evaluation show positive implications of implementing the design strategies: closing the social gap, naturalizing technology, and supporting exploration and discovery in learning.

Global vs. Community Metadata Standards: Empowering Users for Knowledge Exchange

The idea of knowledge sharing has strong roots in the education process. With the current development of the technology and moving learning material into the web environment it acquired a new dimension. Learning objects are the chunks of knowledge shared by e-learning community. Organizations and individuals are building repositories of learning objects and annotate them with metadata to describe their educational values and standardization efforts are on the way to provide a franca lingua for the educators. In this paper we describe the peer-to-peer infrastructure for sharing learning object we are building in Canada. The POOL projects builds on the three types of nodes: SPLASH is an freely downloadable application which allows individuals to create metadata and maintain their collection of learning objects, PONDs are bigger repositories of learning objects connected to the peer-to-peer network and POOL centrals increase the speed and breadth of the searches in the peer-to-peer network. The POOL project uses CanCore - a subset of the IMS metadata protocol - to describe learning objects. In the second part of the paper we discuss the future direction of this initiative based on the maturing learning objects community and lessons learned in the deployment of POOL network. We argue that the standardization effort, although very important, currently provides solutions that are too complex. We see the communities where the knowledge is shared to be the main force in the creation of the metadata standards which would support the growth of semantic web. The implications of moving the responsibility for schemas and metadata creation on communities poses new requirements on interoperability and tools. We describe those requirements and we outline approach we are developing to address them.