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

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.”

A new tool has been added to the Ensemble projects page. This page is based on the Molecule of the Month series from the Protein Data Bank. It demonstrates how information can be dynamically integrated from the Protein Data Bank – an online repository of structural information about large biological molecules – to create 2D and 3D renderings of molecular structures, using Exhibit and Jmol, a java-based 3D chemical structure viewer. The tool can also search the scientific literature via Pubmed for recent articles related to proteins of interest.

At present, it is best viewed using Firefox.

Molecule of the Month from the Protein Data Bank

The first major public output of the Ensemble pilot projects (coinciding with the official launch of the main project on 1st October) is the Plant Evolution Timeline.  This was developed as part of the pilot work of the project by Ben Roberts and Nicola Peart at CARET with support and feedback from members of the University of Cambridge Department of Plant Sciences.

This tool is designed primarily to aid Plant Scientists studying at the University of Cambridge with their learning of plant evolution. The tool is used to provide an overview of course content and major themes for 1^st and 3^rd year students during the first few lectures of their courses, and will also be suitable for use within small group supervisions and for revision purposes. The public version of the timeline offers all of the interactive features but does not link to the specific lecture content of the Cambridge courses.

Nicola Peart, one of the team responsible for the development of the Timeline, describes how:”[the timeline] is useful for helping students assemble a large range of data sources at a range of scales and relevance. It is also useful for teachers illustrating links between data that are difficult to visualise without a tool like this. It is also [helps] researchers to see how different people might draw connections between data, or to inspire further research into variables that may or may not correlate.”

The timeline itself is produced using a modified version of the Timeplot tool developed as part of the SIMILE project at MIT, together with some site-specific Javascript and PHP scripting to handle authentication.  There are instructions and links to other related resources.

The Plant Evolution Timeline