Adaptability of learning objects by appropriate knowledge representation Anastas Misev Institute of Informatics Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics University Ss Cyril and Methodius Skopje, Macedonia

Agenda The idea OpenOffice.org Open document format Open document presentation Management system Practical implementation Future work

The idea The usage of open source software is strongly motivated, especially in the education process OpenOffice is one of the most popular representative of the open source software Besides the obvious financial advantages over commercial packages, most important feature is the open document format The idea is to extract, store, structure, document the knowledge from a open document presentation Using structured knowledge, one can translate that, search through it and most important make custom representations of it And it all started as an idea for a student project

OpenOffice.org The OpenOffice.org is an open source office package It is (almost) fully compatible with most popular commercial office packages Covers all the office needs (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations and even personal database) SUN offers a commercial version (Star Office), free for academic usage Becomes even more popular, especially in the academic and public sector.

Open document format The open document format conforms to the OASIS [ standard for open document formats Actually, the OASIS format is based on the OpenOffice.org XML document format as a proven, real life format The format supports easy transformations, strong separations of content and layout, integration of binary data [Brauer, OpenOffice.org conf, 2003] The actual documents represent archives (.zip archives) of several xml files and additional binary data files (images or other embedded objects, if used). Format allows easy content extraction from the documents and its transformation or different representation [ berlin.de/e_projekte_en/]. Compatibility issues with MS document format can be found in [DiDio, IEEE Computing in science and eng., sept/oct 2003]

Open document presentation Follows the principles of the open document format For the MS users, most important is the migration process It has 2 parts: the actual file conversion and the transitions toward using the OpenOffice.org tools and applications A nice reference can be found in [Becker, OpenOffice.org conf. 2004] Tools for conversion of the MS presentations into the open document format SUN offers a tool for automatic batch conversion of both presentations and templates All basic presentation features are converted properly Some problems may occur with macros and advanced features

Management system The knowledge management system allows users to manipulate, translate, search and customize their presentations in an easy and intuitive manner. Main actions Presentation import Addition of metadata Multilingualism Custom presentation building Transformation of the knowledge into different formats

Presentation import Each presentation can be imported into the system using the simple import tool. When importing a presentation, the user can choose a course, subject and topic for the given presentation. After that, each slide and its elements is imported into the system. For each presentation, a template counterpart is build during the import. At the template, each imported element (slide, text box etc.) is replaced by it’s unique ID in the database

Structuring the information During the presentation import, each element of the presentation is imported into a simple database The database maintains the hierarchical structure of the open document format It also allows addition of metadata, translation, etc.

Addition of metadata Metadata can be added for each imported element. It can include custom defined key-value pairs which will identify in more details the selected element. It can later be used in the process of translating the elements, searching them or building custom presentations. Metadata can also include slide timing which will help in the process of building custom presentations

Multilingualism Since each textual element is identified and inserted into the database, it can be very easily translated into other language. The translation module offers a simple interface for translation, language definition and comparison of the different languages translations Unlike other tools (S-Bahn), it is just a basic side-by-side translation tool

Custom presentations Having all the information into a database, with additional metadata, custom presentations can be easily build. Slides can be searched for data or metadata, or browsed through. Each of them can be selected and added to the new presentation. The presentation language can also be selected and different languages presentations can be created. The presentation timing can also be extracted from the metadata, making custom presentations that will fit fixed time slots. When creating new presentations, slides are extracted from the template presentations, having the ID of the elements as placeholders for the texts. Then, depending on the language selected, the corresponding texts are inserted into the new presentation. Finally, the other elements of the presentations (styles, images etc.) are added to the presentation and its compressed into an open format document

Practical implementation Students projects Implemented in Borland Delphi Implementation done by Gavrilovska, Dejanovska and Gavrilovski MOO – Manipulate Open Office presentations Implements most of the ideas described

MOO

Future work Advanced import features Easier translation Searching through information using content or metadata Advanced methods for new presentations creation Templates More graphical features Transformation into different formats Document, web, other…. Interesting reference about e-Learning objects production from OpenOffice.org documents can be found in [Finsterle, Rotard, OpenOffice.org conf. 2003] Open for suggestions