Re: [InfoGathering] Task Description

Hi Susie,

Happy new year,
your e-mail brings it to the point, nice work!

I will give my 2 bits after each point on e-mail,
perhaps we should gather results on some wiki page....




Es begab sich aber da Susie Stephens zur rechten Zeit 26.12.2006 20:48 
folgendes schrieb:
>
> During the last telcon it was requested that I send out a description 
> of the Information Gathering task, so that people have a better 
> understanding as to exactly what it involves. Well, here's my 
> description.
>
> The goal of the information-gathering task is to identify existing 
> Semantic Web resources, and to ensure that they are easy for others to 
> find and utilize going forwards. Resources for this task will include 
> tools, products, code, demos, papers and books.
>
> It would be expected that the initial stages of the task would focus 
> on identifying how effectively the resources are currently made 
> available. If we discover that a third party is already managing a 
> comprehensive list for one of the types of resource, then we would 
> just point to that list rather than re-create work that is already 
> being undertaken. Alternatively, if we discover that there isn’t a 
> particularly comprehensive or up to date list for a type of resource, 
> then this is an area in which we would want to focus.
>
> For the areas in which we want to focus, there are some key decisions 
> that will need to be made:
> 1. How will we ensure that our work survives beyond the duration of 
> the SWEO interest group? This isn’t an easy question to answer, but it 
> is important, as it would be a great shame if our work were left to 
> stagnate.
in the charter it says we deliver "A resources page", "A collection of 
Semantic Web presentations", "Introductory references",
so it would be a resources page having presentations and references.
Basically we could "pimp the http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ page"
(if you look at this page, people already see presentations, we could 
add more there)

> 2. How will our list of resources coexist with efforts that have 
> already been undertaken? In some cases, individuals may prefer us to 
> take over their lists. In other cases, we may want to combine lists of 
> resources from different places. Sometimes we may want to start from 
> scratch
if I would want to distribute work and have good outreach, I would ask 
individuals who already have informations sources, to allow us to reuse 
them (possibly by providing the source as something like DOAP or RSS 
descriptions).
I see that we only have to start the "One page that links to them all" 
page ourselves, for the individual problems like tools, projects, etc 
there are solutions.
For example the list by Beckett has all the tools, we just motivate him 
to keep it running by reusing his data.

We may also proclaim: people, use the SWEO tag as much as you can, we 
generate our outreach page using the del.icio.us tags.
Then it would not depend on individuals like Beckett to keep their lists 
updated.

> 3. We need to make sure that our lists are useful. We need to make 
> sure that people can easily find what it is they are looking for, and 
> we will likely want to incorporate a preference system to help people 
> identify the more trustworthy resource.
sounds a lot like e-learning.
I
> 4. We will need to decide upon the technology that can help us based 
> upon our earlier decisions.
>
good approach: goals first, then decisions, technology later

> I would envision that one person would want to coordinate this task, 
> while others would focus on the different resources.

At the end one impression I had after reading the mail:
* Lists are one bit, pre-cooked learning objects are another. Often the 
"lack of experts" in the SemWeb is named as a problem. So what tutorials 
should a person read to learn the Semantic Web?
I also got enquiries from people the kind "can you point me to good 
example SPARQL queries to teach in my university class?"
or "what tutorials are there to learn Jena?"
* So if we are "education" we might prepare a "How to learn Programming 
the Sematnic Web" course,
* to do this, we could create an "open pool of shared learning objects", 
learning material that is available under creative commons license, and 
then ask people from universities (or business) to contribute tutorials.

we could then add a trailblazer/trail suggesting learning paths for 
different target groups:
* want to write we apps? learn courses: RDF, ontologies, RAP, RDF-A
* want to integrate data? learn courses: RDF, ontologies, data 
extraction, smushing
....

Btw: I see in our charter that we have one year left. So I would 
schedule this content repository to be up and running sometimes in 
September,
to be realistic and to make it a relaxed work.

Beyond doing everything ourselves:
For storing such content, and creating a website, we could use 
e-learning software.
our e-learning expert said that Moodle and Sakai are the two well-known 
e-learning tools:
* http://moodle.org/
* http://www.sakaiproject.org/
here a report comparing the two:
http://www.isu.edu/itrc/resources/LMS_Focus_Group_Report.pdf

I suggest to use such tools because it helps us to learn more about 
paedagogic (which I lack). Often, the tools offer nice things we would 
not think of, like "information about the author" or other things.
Moodle sounds like this (I have no practical experience with it)
* a free, Open Source <http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php> 
software package designed using sound pedagogical principles 
<http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy>, to help educators create 
effective online learning communities.

Taking the "outreach" literally, I would rather motivate people to 
contribute learning material, and do the editing, metadata, and 
advertisment tasks in the SWEO,
I would not invest into creating the content ourselves.

best
Leo

>
> Cheers,
>
> Susie
>
>


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