Thomas Markus

Using social media for ontology enrichment

In order to support informal learning, we complement the formal knowledge represented by ontologies developed by domain experts with the informal knowledge emerging from social tagging. To this end, we have developed an ontology enrichment pipeline that can automatically enrich a domain ontology using: data extracted by a crawler from social media applications, similarity measures, the DBpedia knowledge base, a disambiguation algorithm and several heuristics. The main goal is to provide dynamic and personalized domain ontologies that include the knowledge of the community of users.

Enhancing the learning process: qualitative validation of an informal learning support system consisting of a knowledge discovery and a social learning component

In a Lifelong Learning context, learners often rely on informal learning materials to access and process information. There is a growing interest in accessing educational material on the social web. We have created a system that facilitates learners and tutors in accessing informal knowledge sources in the context of a learning task and describe the results of a summative and formative evaluation of this system. The system consists of a knowledge discovery component and a social learning component. The evaluation shows that with our system informal resources can successfully enhance the learning process within a Lifelong Learning context. The knowledge discovery component assists the learner in identifying relevant concepts, discovering relations between concepts, and mastering the correct vocabulary. In addition the social learning component offers relevant and trusted documents and contacts on the basis of a learners social network.

Ontology Enrichment with Social Tags for eLearning

One of the objectives of this paper is to verify whether it is possible to extract meaningful related tags from a limited set of tagged resources and from resources tagged by only few users. This is the expected situation in a learning community. An additional goal is to assess whether the related tags extracted can be a useful source for enriching an existing domain ontology. A user centered evaluation has been carried out to analyze the effect of the enriched ontology in supporting a learning task in comparison with clusters of related tags. The experiment has been carried out both with beginners and advanced learners.

Supporting Formal and Informal Learning through Domain Ontologies

One of the objectives of the Language Technology for LifeLong Learning project is to develop services that facilitate learners and tutors in accessing formal and informal knowledge sources. We show that ontologies enriched with social tags play a crucial role in achieving this goal. Ontologies are central to the knowledge discovery process and they facilitate reuse of course material through semantic search of annotated learning objects, supporting thus formal and informal learning.

Supporting knowledge Discovery in an eLearning Environment Having Social Components

One of the goals of the “Language Technology for LifeLong Learning” project is the creation of an appropriate methodology to support both formal and informal learning. Services are being developed that are based on the interaction between a formal representation of (domain) knowledge in the form of an ontology created by experts and a social component which complements it, that is tags and social networks. It is expected that this combination will improve learner interaction, knowledge discovery as well as knowledge co-construction.

Integrating social media and semantic structure in the learning process

This paper presents the validation of an in Formal Learning Support System (iFLSS) that integrates social media and semantic structure within the learning process. The validation has shown that the system supports the learning process and results in an improved domain understanding.