1. An Ontology-Based Approach for Sharing Digital Resources in Teacher Education 7 th International Workshop on Ontologies and Semantic Web for E-Learning Brighton, UK, July 7 th 2009

2. In this presentation: Etymology Share.TEC project Teacher Education Ontology Ontology Implementation Final words and a question

3. Etymology

4. Information Etymology: informationem (nom. Informatio, Latin) outline, concept, idea If you give me an apple and I give you an apple, each will have an apple. If you give me an idea and I give you an idea, each will have two ideas.

5. Ontology Etymology: ὄ ντος: of being; -λογία: science, study, theory (from Greek) study of the nature, categories and relations of entities Formal representation of concepts and their interrelations within a domain.

6. Share.TEC Project SHAring Digital REsources in the Teaching Education Community eContentplus programme (ECP 2007 EDU 427015) http://www.sharetecproject.eu

7. General Problems Scattered resources Not structured, not searchable Lack of sufficient metainformation

8. Teacher Education Generally slow to embrace innovation National systems are linguistically and culturally bound TE communities (even virtual ones) tend to focus on the immediate locus Scarce sharing of digital resources

9. Share.TEC Goals Build an advanced user-focused system Aggregating Europe-wide metadata Providing personalized, culturally-sensitive brokerage Supporting the development of perspective among those working in and with the TE community

10. Teacher Education Ontology (TEO)

11. Ontology-driven Approach The purpose of TEO is to provide: pedagogical characterization of digital content representation of user profiles and competencies multilingual and multicultural foundation personalized interaction with adaptive applications support for recommending functions

12. TEO Development Three main models of reference: the OMNIBUS ontology, whose domain is education the LORNET competency modelling ontology the POEM learning object content model And: DOLCE, ONTOURAL, ALOCOM, PROTON, etc…

13. Basic Concepts About 160 classes, 80 properties Basic concepts: –Digital content –Knowledge area –Generic skill –Competency –Actors and roles

14. Digital content Refers to educational resources and artifacts closely related to the concept of the learning object Categorized as pedagogically structured –resources for learners, lesson plans, learning design units … or non-pedagogically structured –computer simulation, concept map, questionnaire Other characteristics like employment mode, didactic strategy and content type.

15. Knowledge Area Topics drawn from the EUROSTAT taxonomy of education and training European perspective and pertinence to the TE domain Digital content can be described in terms of discipline Specification of the user’s areas of interest EUROSTAT has been mapped against Dewey’s Decimal Classification

16. Other concepts Generic skills and competencies: –Association of a knowledge area and a generic skill generates a competency concept Actors: –Description of Share.TEC user –Has a role, preferences, behaviour, etc.

17. TEO Implementation

18. Implementation 800+ entities (classes, properties, instances) Language-neutral concept-oriented data Hierarchical searching and filtering Dynamic multilingual user interface Stability to future changes

19. Minimalistic approach

20. TEO Hierarchies

21. Conceptualization and language neutrality

22. Multidimensional search

23. Hierarchical searching

24. Dynamic Navigation Hierarchical traversing of data Custom-defined searching paths Interactive browsing of statistical data Hiding the complexity of the TEO Integration of user preferencing

25. Scenario – step 1 Select first criteria: Language (e.g. German)

26. Scenario – step 2 Only for documents in German select: Practice Context (e.g. Primary School)

27. Scenario – step 3 Only for documents in German about primary school select: Teacher’s Role (e.g. Head of School)

28. Scenario – step 4 … Only for documents in German about head of a primary school select: virtually any other dimension and so on.. … or go back and take a dive into the data pool from another direction

29. Multicultural coverage

30. Multicultural issues Multicultural is not just multilingual There are concepts that does not exist in all cultures There are concepts that exists in all cultures, but have distinct nuances Multiculturalism is dynamic Person searching within own culture should not notice multiculturalism

31. Multicultural Example 123456789101112 PrimarySecondary 0 TertiaryPre-Pr PrimarySecondaryTertiaryPr Cultural dimension Grades There are concepts: 1.with complete mapping 2.existing in only one culture 3.mapping to more than one concept 4.mapping partly to another concept and partly to nothing 3 12 4

32. Conceptualization 1234567891011120 PrimarySecondaryTertiaryPre-PrPrimarySecondaryTertiaryPr Cultural dimension Grades C0C1C2C3C4C5 Level of cultural independent conceptualization

33. Translation PrimarySecondaryTertiaryPre-PrPrimarySecondaryTertiaryPr C0C1C2C3C4C5 Level of cultural independent conceptualization Translations in language S Translations in language O Primus SecundusTertiusPre-Tertius PrimoPre-Primo Secundo Tertio n/a TEO

34. Case 1 – Full mapping PrimarySecondaryTertiaryPre-PrPrimarySecondaryTertiaryPr C0C1C2C3C4C5 Level of cultural independent conceptualization Translations in language S Translations in language O Primus SecundusTertiusPre-Tertius PrimoPre-Primo Secundo Pre-Secundo Tertio n/a TEO Searching for secundo will map to C3 and will find secundo and secundus

35. Case 2 – No full mapping PrimarySecondaryTertiaryPre-PrPrimarySecondaryTertiaryPr C0C1C2C3C4C5 Level of cultural independent conceptualization Translations in language S Translations in language O Primus SecundusTertiusPre-Tertius PrimoPre-Primo Secundo Pre-Secundo Tertio n/a TEO Searching for primus will map to C1 and C2 and will find primus, primo and pre-primo Searching for primo will map to C2 and will find primo and primus Searching for pre-primo will map to C0 and C1 and will also find preprimo and primus

36. Conclusions When searching within own cultural domain there is always 1:1 correspondence Searching within another cultural domain using “foreign to it concepts” may produce some unwanted but still related results (in the context of the other cultural domain) To search in another cultural domain without any ambiguity use its own language and concepts

37. Final words and a question…

38. In Europe we have this:

39. … and we want to make this!

40. And now the question… Do we have some time for questions? … to the moderator …

41. The End

42. Contact Information Pavel Boytchev Department of Information Technologies Faculty of mathematics and Informatics Sofia University boytchev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg