Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

The Human Semant c Web
Figure 10. The same Edutella query presented on the human Semantic Web through
a query-interface on Conzilla (with most of the information hidden)
Conzilla. Here, the query is formulated as a Boolean tree, with “or” expressed as a
UML generalization and “and” as a UML aggregation, which have the corresponding
semantics.
Supporting.the.Concept-in-Context.Methodology
The rapidly increasing internationalization and professionalism of higher education
is dependent on the methodology and the quality of the supporting ICT tools.
In this context, projects like Sakai (n.d.) and ELF (n.d.) are blazing a new trail.
Instead of leaving the development of quality tools and services needed by the
university to the commercial actors, these projects have taken the lead by having
member institutions collaboratively develop an open source portals and learning
systems/tools/services. Currently, more than 65 institutions from 10 countries are
Sakai members and participate in the development of the Sakai system. In addition,
many other schools, including K-12, community colleges, and universities, are
interested in adopting the open source Sakai toolkit. Use of Sakai on a large scale
at many universities provides a good opportunity to introduce new methodologies
and new ways of teaching.
At the time of writing of this chapter, we are involved with Sakai in defining a
project that aims to help students achieve better learning outcomes by the collaborative
construction of kuman semantic learning Webs accessed through supportive,
well-integrated, ICT-based frameworks and technologies. The project proposes
integration of our concept-mapping methodology, called concept-in-context, into
Sakai. This methodology encourages students and teachers to externalize what is
being learned by expressing concepts and their relationships in various contexts.
The methodology has been tested with various student groups at KTH (Blomqvist,
Handberg, & Naeve, 2003) over the past few years with promising results. 22 The
explicit aims of the concept-in-context methodology are the following:
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