UNIVERSAL Project

Dear members of the RDF-Interest-Group!

May I use the opportunity to introduce a European Union Project that uses RDF
(administered through the Information Society Directorate of the European Commission
- IST project n. 1999-1747) :

The project I am into is called UNIVERSAL and has the objective to set up 
an open repository for learning resources, which will be the basis for 
exchange activities and collaboration among faculty members. I put some 
text below ellaborating on the vision of UNIVERSAL and the underlying 
functionality of the platform. The following link points you to our data 
model based on RDF: 

             http://nm.wu-wien.ac.at/universal/metadata/ 

You can also find examples in RDF:XML notation and examples for
the resulting Triples there.

Please feel free to send us comments or to ask questions.

Thank you very much and best Regards from Vienna

Thomas Enzi 

Contact persons on the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Department of  Information Systems - New Media Working Group:

Thomas Enzi (thomas.enzi@wu-wien.ac.at)
Bernd Simon (bernd.simon@wu-wien.ac.at)
Gustaf Neumann (gustaf.neumann@wu-wien.ac.at) 

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Mission Statement

UNIVERSAL links teachers, educators, and trainers to an e-learning market 
place and supports the exchange, distribution and management of learning 
resources.

Benefits

* Participate in a learning community of scholars through interaction with 
instructors, experts and peers;
* Enrich institutional curriculum though access to high quality external 
resources ;
* Enhance quality teaching ;
* Share in the creation process and use of highly specialised learning 
resources with academics world-wide ;
* Access new academic distribution channels ;
* Foster national and international academic alliances and exchanges ;
* Enable partnerships between institutions of higher education and industry .

UNIVERSAL Brokerage Service

Intellectual capital is becoming the key differentiator in the increasingly 
competitive education industry. Therefore knowledge constitutes the raw 
material, that when structured, indexed and exchanged, will give 
stakeholders a sustainable competitive advantage. UNIVERSAL will enable 
collaboration among leading educators by providing exchange services for 
learning resources via the UNIVERSAL Brokerage Platform (UBP). A learning 
resource is a form of highly specialised academic content. A learning 
resource could be a short video or a complete course. The UBP supports the 
cataloguing and delivery both live sessions and packaged content. The 
following examples of learning resources are taken from the current version 
of the UNIVERSAL catalogue:
* A recorded lecture on “The Semantic Web Today”.
* A live session of the course “International Marketing” dealing with an 
ethics case study on Levi Strauss entering the Chinese market;


The UBP supports the whole value chain of exchange between providers and 
consumers. Community-based notification services and a powerful search 
engine make learning resources instantaneously available to interested 
educators, who book them for learners. The UBP tracks booking and delivery 
of learning resources in order to provide contributors with a detailed 
feedback about the usage of their learning resources.


UNIVERSAL exploits state-of-the-art technology such as XML, RDF and 
JavaServlets in order to develop an e-market for learning resources which 
is interoperable between  heterogeneous delivery systems such as Web 
servers, Realnetwork’s videoserver, and ISABEL, an IP-based 
videoconferencing tool. Additional interfaces will make it possible to 
automatically integrate IEEE LOM-compliant learning resource 
descriptions  stored on learning management systems such as Hyperwave’s 
eLearning Suite. UNIVERSAL is considered a leading project in the field of 
applying Semantic Web technology to the area of higher education, thus 
influencing standardisation initiatives such as the IMS Learning Resource 
Meta-data Specification.


Who should become a member

Key in our view is that the emergence of information and communications 
technologies are economic and effective methods for the exchange and 
distribution of knowledge. We are looking for institutions who would like 
to use our compelling and powerful tool to facilitate the exchange of 
knowledge. They could be:
ˇ       Higher education institutions
ˇ       Open universities
ˇ       Individual faculty members
ˇ       Trainers
ˇ       Academic alliances
ˇ       Academic educational content providers
ˇ       Training organisations
ˇ       Corporate universities


Partners

ˇ       Aachen University of Technology (DE)
ˇ       BIT: Bureau for International Research and Technology Cooperation (AT),
ˇ       Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (CH)
ˇ       HEC: Hautes Etudes Commerciales (FR)
ˇ       Hellenic Open University (GR)
ˇ       Helsinki University of Technology (FI)
ˇ       Iceland Telecom (IS)
ˇ       Infonova (AT)
ˇ       Institut Jozef Stefan (SL)
ˇ       Institut National des Télécommunications (FR)
ˇ       National Center of Scientific Research Demokritos (GR)
ˇ       T-Nova Deutsche Telekom Innovationsgesellschaft mbH (DE)
ˇ       Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (ES)
ˇ       Université Libre de Bruxelles (BE)
ˇ       University of Lancaster (UK)
ˇ       Warsaw University of Technology (PL)
ˇ       Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (AT)

Project Co-ordinator
Gregoire Besnier (e-mail: <Besnier@bit.ac.at>)



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Thomas Enzi                             Thomas.Enzi@wu-wien.ac.at
Research Assistant, UNIVERSAL Project
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Augasse 2-6, A-1090 Vienna, Austria  
Tel: (+43-1) 31 336 x4417
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Received on Wednesday, 27 June 2001 06:18:05 UTC