ENSEMBLE

The Ensemble Project will present its plans, development work and early findings in a symposium at the international Computer Assisted Learning Conference to be held in Brighton in March 2009.

An initial overview of the project and some of the emerging issues and themes will be followed by presentations of four of the demonstrators developed during the Pilot Phase of the project (Summer 2008).  These include examples drawn from across disciplines and demonstrate different applications of semantic technologies.

Participants in the symposium will have an opportunity to engage in discussions with the presenters in a ’round-table’ format which will be further supported by a poster display.  Rather than having a formal discussant role, a chaired ‘panel discussion’ will allow participants to offer responses to the presentations.  We intend that this session will initiate a continuing dialogue about the potential, nature and scope of ‘Web 3.0′ to enhance teaching and learning.

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