ENSEMBLE

María del Mar Sánchez, Malle, has joined the work of ENSEMBLE Project on a four months fellowship. She is a PhD student at the University of Murcia (Spain), thanks to a scholarship from the Ministry of Education to Spain, where she also works as a researcher in the GITE (Research group for educational Technologies). At present she is interested in Open Source and education and in her doctoral thesis she is working in how new Semantic Technologies will contribute to the development of e-Assessment systems and online feedback to learners.

Malle says, “The ENSEMBLE project is one of the most important international projects studying the application of the Semantic Web in education. Semantic Web is a very interesting topic and will be very important in the future of the educational web tools.”.

Her fellowship with the project will allow her to understand better the Semantic Web and work with the most important specialists in the area, that will allow her to propose improvements to the assessment application being developed at the University of Murcia and the possibility of combining the work done by both institutions.

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

Over the summer, Ensemble staff at Caret have been joined by four Undergraduate Research OPportunities (UROP) student interns. The projects began in July and are reaching their conclusion this week. The students have tackled diverse topics, including Plant Sciences, data about life in Edwardian Britain, Maritime Operations and Management, and creation of a new RDF-izer. Watch this space for further details of each project over the coming weeks.

Pictured: Emilia Plotka, Iestyn Pryce, Rob Mackinnon, Thomas Kluyver.

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.”