Project Aims
The aim of this project was to create an educational resource about the role of Essex during the English Civil War
with the potential to enable learners to investigate a set of original documents aided by expert commentaries and
contextual information about places, people and events. This was achieved by linking a wide range of different data
sources within a single semantic web resource. The resource was aimed primarily at secondary school students, but
with potential applications in a wider range of teaching and learning settings.
A rich data set already existed, providing biographical and geographical context for a set of documents, together with additional data about the documents and relationships between them. The documents were transcipts of original documents currently held at the Essex Records Office.
Teaching and Learning Issues
The pedagogical objective was to combine and present the existing documents and rich contextual data in a
way that would support exploratory learning, so that the learner could approach the resource with or without a question in mind and follow ‘trails’ through the documents and the contextual data provided.
The Development Process
The technical objectives were the evaluation of the potential of SIMILE’s ‘Babel’ and ‘Exhibit’ tools when dealing with existing semantic data about resources of different types. Several different data formats were integrated including .doc, .txt, .html and RDF. As understanding of the use of Semantic Web standards and tools developed, so too did the web resource, which evolved through three major iterations. Initially the resource drew on one stable text dataset. This was extended to include elements across multiple datasets, then finally the resource coding was written to query chains of data, such as person to place to event at that place.
