ISWC’04 WORKSHOP
ISWC 2004: International Semantic Web Conference
(Hiroshima, Japan, November 7-11, 2004)

Applications of Semantic Web Technologies for E-learning

SW-EL'04 : Semantic Web for E-Learning

SWEL Workshop co-chairs
Lora Aroyo
Darina Dicheva

SWEL ISWC’04 Session chair
Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka University
Yukihiro Itoh, Shizuoka University, (SIG-IES, JSAI)

CFP Important Dates Submission Organization Program

The Semantic web offers new technologies to the developers of web-based applications aiming at providing more intelligent access and management of web information and semantically richer modelling of the applications and their users. An important target for web application researchers and developers nowadays is to provide means to unite, as much as possible, the efforts in creating information and knowledge components that are easily accessible and usable by third parties. Within the context of semantic web, there are several hot issues, which allow achieving such reusability, shareability and interoperability among web applications. Conceptualizations (formal taxonomies), ontologies, and the available web standards, such as XML, RDF, XTM, OWL, DAML-S, and RuleML, allow specification of components in a standard way. The notion of web services offers a way to make such components mobile and accessible within the wide sea of web information and applications. The research on adaptive educational hypermedia and web-based educational systems (WBES) traditionally combines research interests and efforts from various fields. Currently, the efforts in the field of semantic web and ontologies play an important role in the development of new methods and types of courseware. Starting with the traditional ITS and going towards web applications, the research on adaptive educational hypermedia strengthens its positions within this context. They all come together in their attempt to serve better the needs of the education community by employing semantic web technologies in order to achieve improved adaptation and flexibility for single and group users (e.g. instructors, courseware authors and learners).

Researchers with interest in various aspects of applying semantic web technologies in web-based educational systems will get together at the three SW-EL'04 workshop sessions in order to discuss important issues in this field and present their latest results. Each session will convey a different perspective on the application and role of semantic web technologies for adaptive educational hypermedia. The schedule of the three sessions is the following:

SW-EL'04 Session at AH

Session co-chairs Peter Dolog and Martin Wolpers

23rd August, 2004

SW-EL'04 Session at ITS

Session co-chairs: Vladan Devedzic and Tanja Mitrovic

31th September, 2004

SW-EL'04 Session at ISWC

Session co-chairs: Riichiro Mizoguchi and Yukihiro Itoh

8th November, 2004

SWEL’04 follows the successful workshop on Concepts and Ontologies in Web-based Educational Systems, held in conjunctions with ICCE’2002 in Auckland, New Zealand.

Session Topics

The SW-EL'04 workshop session at the ISWC’04 will focus on the application of semantic web technologies and standards for the needs of educational web-based systems, discuss issues related to their use for content and knowledge components specification, effective courseware constructing and modelling the learner. The goal of the workshop is threefold:

To discuss the current state-of-the-art of the applications of semantic web technologies and standards in web-based educational systems.
To attract the interest of the broad web and semantic web research communities to the problems of intellinget educaitonal systems and serve as an international platform for knowledge exchange and cooperation between researchers.
To provide feedback to educational and semantic web standardization bodies.

Appropriate topics for the ISWC’04 session of the SWEL’04 workshop are listed below however contributors are free to suggest additional ones. The topics can be approached from different perspectives: theoretical, systems engineering, application, case study and system evaluation, etc. All contributions are required to state explicitly in the abstract which topic they are addressing.

Using ontologies and/or semantic web technologies within e-learning applications (to achieve interoperability between educational applications, sharable user models and knowledge components, etc.).
Ontology engineering and knowledge representation in WBES.
Using ontologies and/or semantic web technologies to support authoring of WBES.
Using semantic web technologies to achieve better personalization and adaptation in WBES (i.e. modularised and standardized architectures, separation of domain models and application models, flexible user models).
Using semantic web services for the purposes of e-learning (i.e. e-learning services, user modelling service, WBES authoring service).
Web standards issues for WBES (what should be included, e.g. formal languages, rules, metadata, educational modelling languages).
Exploring possible combinations of existing semantic web and/or educational standards and mappings between them.
Moving educational standards such as LOM and SCORM closer to the semantic web.
Role of RDF, OWL or TML as a basis for educational metadata specification languages.
Real-world systems, case studies and empirical research for WBES.
Semantic web-based WBES architectures.

Lora Aroyo
Department of Computing Science * Eindhoven University of Technology * PO Box 513, 5600 MD Eindhoven * The Netherlands
tel: +31 40 2472765 * fax: +31 40 2463992

Darina Dicheva
Department of Computer Science * Winston-Salem State University * 601 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, Winston Salem, N.C. 27110 * USA
tel: +1 (336) 750-2484 * fax: +1 (336) 750-2499

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Applications of Semantic Web Technologies for E-learning

SW-EL'04: Semantic Web for E-Learning

Session Topics

SW-EL'04 : Semantic Web for E-Learning