ENSEMBLE

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.”

Dr Anja Westram has joined the Ensemble project on a six-month visiting fellowship funded under the EU “Leonardo” Scheme.  With a background in molecular biology and psychology, Anja says “I recognised that interdisciplinary research in both fields could bridge the gap between the disciplines and enrich the knowledge in these fields beyond that gained in each discipline alone”.

With this in mind, the project provides an opportunity for Anja to bring together her biological knowledge with educational psychology and to gain valuable insights into the role of  innovative teaching tools.  Working with Patrick Carmichael at CARET and Keith Johnstone in the Department of Plant Sciences, she will carrying out scoping and prototyping of a development of a semantic web tool for teaching and learning about biochemical pathways.