Semantic Web Technologies &
Higher Education
10/07/2008
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed:
Teaching, Learning, and Research
George Siemens, COHERE Blended Learning Conference, 10/03/2008,
http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/tradition-and-emergencepresentation/
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed:
Teaching, Learning, and Research (Collaboration):
Another perspective
Terry Anderson, “Toward a Theory of Online
Learning,” Athabasca University, Theory and
Practice on Online Learning; e-book from
http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/ch2.ht
ml
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed:
Trends in Online Education
George Siemens, COHERE Blended Learning Conference, 10/03/2008,
http://www.slideshare.net/gsiemens/tradition-and-emergencepresentation/
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed Teaching, Learning, &
Social Networking: Projects
 Sakai + Blackboard (http://sakaiproject.org/portal), or
Moodle + Blackboard (http://moodle.org/):
 “Imagine a world where students go to a single URL and
connect to their course regardless of which course management
system it is hosted on. Dashboards consolidate information for
users from these many systems. Administrators easily access
accounts and information across these systems; thus simplifying
helpdesk operations. The Learning Environment Connector
makes this world possible.”

John Fontaine, Blackboard’s senior director of engineering, in a
company blog post last month (before Syracuse was announced as the
partner institution).
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed Teaching, Learning, &
Social Networking: Projects
 Inigral (http://www.inigral.com/) & Course Feed
(http://www.coursefeed.com/), Facebook-like apps
combined with educational tools or course management
software:
 “We think there is a lot of value, and universities are starting to
realize this, in having students feel more connected to each
other and to campus life,” Staton, founder and CEO of Inigral.
 Rather than compete with course management systems, some
of which are also migrating onto Facebook or inspiring
independently designed applications, Inigral is attempting to
encompass the college experience as a whole.
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed Research: Projects
 My Net Research (http://www.mynetresearch.com/), allowing
collaborative research on a global scale:
 Modern Web 2.0 research portals allow researchers to collaborate on
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
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the site itself, manage actual documents and also network with
colleagues and other potential researchers.
It enables powerful web-based searches and the classification of
results into personal taxonomies.
The portal uses comprehensive knowledge classifications for
categorizing users and their research interests and abilities, allowing
researchers to find ideal research collaborators with accuracy.
It employs forums, blogs, expert article postings, sophisticated
project management and news feeds of the latest research news.
In addition, it incorporates specialized research tools that academics
use most often, such as survey creation/deployment tools, citation
tools, bibliography management and many others.
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed Research: Projects
 VIVO at Cornell University
(http://vivo.cornell.edu/about?home=65535)
 VIVO (not an acronym) brings together in one site publicly
available information on the people, departments, graduate
fields, facilities, and other resources that collectively make up
the research and scholarship environment in all disciplines at
Cornell.
 Search VIVO for information about faculty, departments and
research units, undergraduate majors, graduate fields, courses,
research services and facilities --- anything related to academic
and research pursuits at Cornell.
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed: Projects which Combine
Teaching, Research, Social Networking, & Learning
 Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: OAI-ORE
(http://www.openarchives.org/ore/)
 Defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of
Web resources, sometimes called compound digital objects.
 May combine distributed resources with multiple media types
including text, images, data, and video.
 The goal is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to
applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization,
reuse, and preservation.
 Motivation: The changing nature of scholarship and scholarly
communication and the need for cyber-infrastructure to support it;
and to develop standards that generalize across all web-based
information, including the increasingly popular social networks of
web 2.0.
Semantic Web Uses in Higher Ed: Projects which Combine
Teaching, Research, Social Networking, & Learning
 SIMILE (http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/SIMILE:About):
 Seeks to enhance interoperability among digital assets,
schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata distributed across
individual, community, and institutional stores.
 SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for
arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of
RDF and semantic web techniques.
 The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination
architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination
architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a
particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance),
and bind those views to consuming services.
 To guide the SIMILE effort we will focus on well-defined, real-world
use cases in the libraries domain.