Last modified: 2011-12-22
Abstract
The wide adoption of technologies that enable users to connect to each other and to contribute to the online community has changed the way that content is organized and shared on the Web. Social tagging to annotate resources represents one of the innovative aspects introduced with Web 2.0 and the new challenges of the semantic Web 3.0. In many online applications, it is possible for users to upload their own content or links to existing content and to organize it by use of tags, i.e., free-form keywords. Such applications, examples of which are delicious, flickr, and BibSonomy, are commonly referred to as Collaborative Tagging Systems and they use the Internet to harness collective intelligence.
In this paper we present a project aiming at the design and implementation of a CollaboRative Environment for Students and Teachers, named CREST. CREST can be used in a broad range of collaborative applications and enable multi-authoring, using information in educational interactions, indicating information source, maintaining information, structuring information and adding meta-information, and sharing information among participants. The nature of the collaborative learning involves intensive interactions and exertion of knowledge effect. It cannot be achieved without the capabilities of the participants to manage their knowledge. The participants are required to contribute through annotations that may include features such as comments on multimedia objects: text, 2D/3D objects, audio, video, virtual graphical spaces.
In general terms, an annotation is a relationship between one object and another. In this project we investigate several methods of displaying these relationships. By distributing to users the power to create, edit, store, and retrieve objects and annotations, we promote development and re-use of meaningful content. Such environments can have great utility for the development of virtual learning and research spaces.
Formal ontologies generally produced by experts are opposed to heterogeneous tags added by numerous users with various profiles. Here we propose a model taking advantages of both semantic and participative approaches. The goal of this model is to help developing applications for sharing resources into communities of practice. It is based on a progressive indexing in which users progressively structure metadata, to finally allow semantic reasoning by computers and a shared vision of the domain by humans.
This model integrates a social bookmarking tool, namely SEMANTICSCUTTLE (2010), offering original features like tags structured by relations of inclusion and synonymy, or wiki spaces to describe tags. Another integrated facility is the tagging system of 2D objects achieved through ANNOTATION PILOT (2011) and a 3D ontology-enabled semantic annotator, ShapeAnnotator (AIM&SHAPE, 2004). The environment was developed and tested with students and teachers activating in the field of Archaeology.