Topics

Semantic Web technologies have appeared to hold the promise of efficient support in Higher Education institutions. Although issues such as ontology consensus, large-scale annotation of learning content and the underpinning pedagogy seemed to question semantic technology adoption in the early years, recent developments seem promising. The lightweight knowledge modelling (often called folksonomies) in Web 2.0 systems and the emerging linked open data movement appear to bring significant value in terms of interoperability, well-formedness of metadata, data integration, reasoning across resources, novel ways of collaboration and personalisation, which can provide better support for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

There are opportunities and challenges in this emerging area of semantic technology adoption that this workshop wishes to address. In particular, the workshop will address the following themes:

• Semantic application for Learning Support in Higher Education
• Collaborative learning and critical thinking enabled by semantic applications
• Semantic application using linked data in repositories inside and across institutions
• Interoperability among Universities based on Semantic Web standards
• Ontologies and reasoning to support pedagogical models
• Transition from soft semantics and lightweight knowledge modelling to machine processable, hard semantics
• University workflows using Semantic Web applications and standards

SemHE invites original papers and demonstration proposals in the above areas.

The best papers will be invited to resubmit a journal paper version for a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, which is scheduled for publication in 2010.