ENSEMBLE

The Ensemble Project was represented at the inaugural workshop of SemHE (Semantic Web Applications for Teaching and Learning Support in Higher Education), at the EC-TEL conference in Nice on September 30th 2009.  This brought together researchers and developers from nine countries.

Members of the Ensemble project team presented two papers:

• Patrick Carmichael and Agustina Martinez Garcia. Semantic Technologies to Support Teaching and Learning with Cases: Challenges and Opportunities
• Michael Tscholl, Frances Tracy and Patrick Carmichael. Case Methods, Pedagogical Innovation and Semantic Technologies

There was also a display of posters from the project showing work in progress and pilot projects.

For full details of SemHE see the website at: http://www.semhe.org

There is a report of the workshop at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/2752

Iestyn Pryce is a 2nd year Engineering student at Cambridge. He intends to specialise in Information and Computer Engineering. Iestyn has been a UROP student at Caret with the Ensemble Project over the summer vacation this year, and he has developed a new RDF-izer called ‘Gwybodaeth’ (the Welsh word for ‘knowledge’).

“Gwybodaeth is a set of Perl classes for conversion of data into RDF. It is utility to convert data which isn’t semantic into nice, RDF-ized semantic data” says Iestyn. “It is designed to be modular and extensible because there are n-types of non-semantic data out there, so it was designed so that other people could easily add small bits to the program, so that they can convert from whatever format they have in to RDF”.

What sets Gwybodaeth apart from other existing RDF-izers is the ability to preserve namespaces, allowing data mapping, whilst being a simple to use, user-friendly web service. Iestyn says, “Maps are incredibly useful. Not only do they mean that you don’t have to change your data beforehand, it also means that you can have things like logic.”

Users within the University of Cambridge can use Gwybodaeth as a web service at http://gwybodaeth.caret.cam.ac.uk/. Gwybodaeth has also been released as an open-source application this week at the CPAN - click here to visit its webpage.

For further information:

• Read the Gwybodaeth documentation
• Get Gwybodaeth at the CPAN
• Github

Agustina Martinez presented a paper describing the work of the project at the Open Repositories Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.  In her paper “The Ensemble Project: Using Fedora to Support the Development of the Semantic Web for Education”, she described how the project was using the Fedora Digital Repository and Mulgara Triplestore to allow teachers and learners to gain direct access to data and incorporate it into teaching and learning applications.

Agustina reported from the conference: “This year the main theme of the conference has been the merger between the two biggest repository communities, Fedora and Dspace, creating the new  “Duraspace” organization, which plans to maintain, for the moment, separate developments of both repositories, but will also develop new technologies and services that respond to  new requirements from existing and future users. The conference has been a good place to share experiences with people from other universities and disciplines, to find out on what others are working and to get new ideas for future developments.”

The Ensemble Project’s Fedora Repository and associated Mulgara Semantic Triplestore had their first public outing at a lunchtime seminar for staff at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex.  Patrick Carmichael, and Louise Corti presented an overview of the project and Agustina Martinez Garcia demonstrated how an appropriately constructed digital repository could serve both data and metadata to web applications.

Agustina showed how large data sets could be accessed, ‘rules’ applied and the results could then be presented using the visualisation tools developed by the SIMILE project at MIT.

The illustration shows how data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) can be viewed using the SIMILE ‘Exhibit’ Tool and its Google Map element. Users can select observations of plants and use these as the starting points of further investigations, queries and hypothesis formulation.

Patrick Carmichael, Ensemble Project Director, explained: “these developments  mark an important move forward for the project: they enable us to deal with much larger data sets then previously, which will allow teachers and learners to engage with real data rather than small exemplary collections.  Supporting this kind of authentic learning is an important component of the case based approaches we are finding in the research settings in which we are working.”