The evolution of mobile technologies in the last few years has radically changed the way and places in which people can get access to information. This transformation has influenced several contexts from business to everyday life activities. It is more and more common to see digital natives using their smartphone when they are walking around the city or waiting at the bus stop. Guessing what they are doing with their smartphone is not easy: are they gaming? Are they browsing Internet pages or checking their profile in their favorite social network? Recent statistics highlight the number of young people using their mobile devices for learning is growing. This is an important indicator which shows that mobile learning is ready to move from the research labs and experimental phase (which in almost 10 years have highlighted the educational potentials of mobile devices) towards a mature phase where students and, above all, teachers, will consider it as a learning methodology which complements, supports, enriches and sometimes substitutes more traditional learning strategies. A further step towards this transition is related to the advances in the technological development of mobile devices in the last decade, which have made it possible the commercial availability of smartphones with good computation capabilities , which are getting more and more popular amongst young people. Through the support of a smartphone, a walk around a city can turn into an opportunity for learning and it is not necessary to organize it in advance, as teachers use to do in traditional school trips. Indeed, the most popular mobile stores already include, in their catalogs, several applications providing specific information about hundreds of cities in the world. This information can be used to support the visit of a city successfully, but the scope of these applications rarely extend beyond their use as tourist guide. Specifically to their educational use, the information provided by these applications is usually extracted from proprietary data source, and cannot be easily customized to be really suitable for learning settings. Consequently, teachers wishing to organize learning experiences around the city have to prepare learning content in advance, and maintain it during the whole lifespan of the application. In this abstract, we present MeLOD, a mobile learning environment, which exploits the huge amount of dataset in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud to overcome the previous issues, by providing contextualized updated information based on students location. The position of the student sent by the mobile device is used to interlink Geonames, DBpedia and Europeana datasets to provide information about all the interesting cultural heritage sites close to the student. Moreover, students social activities like voting and commenting are used to enhance the knowledge base of the environment and to provide recommendations for next students visits. A prototype of the MeLOD mobile application has been developed for iOS devices and it is available for free on the Apple Store. More information about the environment are available at: http://melod.pa.itd.cnr.it/ The MeLOD environment is composed by two main modules: a mobile application, with a friendly user interface, that shows the information to the students during their visit, and a set of web services that elaborate the requests coming from the mobile application to provide interlinked information from different open datasets. The main datasets exploited by the MeLOD environment are (at the time of writing) three: DBpedia, Geonames and Europeana. Moreover, in the last few years, many municipalities, in the world in general and in Italy in particular, are releasing their data as Open Data. For instance the municipality of Palermo has already released the data about historical buildings in open format. These data contain information related to opening hours, entrance costs, closing day, and other information under the responsibility of the municipality, thus this data can be really useful to enhance the description already available on the datasets of the LOD cloud (such as DBpedia and Europeana). The MeLOD environment have been designed with the aim of: - providing support for personalized learning experiences. In particular, users of the MeLOD environment can select their preferences related to language, categories of interest and preferred media type. It is important to highlight that the content is not prepared in advance in several languages but the increasingly number of translation of the DBpedia ontology are exploited to provide localized content according to the language selected by the user. Users can select their preferred topic categories from a list retrieved from the main topic classifications of the DBpedia category graph, some examples of categories are: Education, Geography, History, Arts and Life. Finally, users can select their settings related to the preferred media type. In this way they can decide to receive contents in different formats (only text, text and images, all multimedia formats) depending on the technical capabilities of their device or the reliability of the network (GPRS, 3G, Wi-fi). - providing geo-located information depending on the mobile learners localization by exploiting the Linked Open Data capabilities. In particular, MeLOD uses the services of the GeoNames API to establish whether Wikipedia pages concerning cultural heritage sites are physically located nearby the user position. The list of these Wikipedia entries is used to access the corresponding resource on the DBpedia ontology, so that the structured format of the DBpedia ontology can be exploited to improve the information delivered to the users. - supporting social learning activities making explicit the ties between the profile of the users and their interaction with other users and the content they access. In particular the social activities of voting and commenting performed by users during a visit of the city have been taken into consideration. These activities are used to feed new knowledge into the student profile. Data regarding the cultural heritage visited by each user, the educational materials accessed by him/her, the votes and comments published by the learners, in relation to the time when and location in which every single activity takes places provide feedback to the learners and teachers, and can activate recommender system based on users preferences.
Exploiting Linked Data for supporting mobile learning experiences
Davide Taibi;Giovanni Fulantelli;Marco Arrigo
2014
Abstract
The evolution of mobile technologies in the last few years has radically changed the way and places in which people can get access to information. This transformation has influenced several contexts from business to everyday life activities. It is more and more common to see digital natives using their smartphone when they are walking around the city or waiting at the bus stop. Guessing what they are doing with their smartphone is not easy: are they gaming? Are they browsing Internet pages or checking their profile in their favorite social network? Recent statistics highlight the number of young people using their mobile devices for learning is growing. This is an important indicator which shows that mobile learning is ready to move from the research labs and experimental phase (which in almost 10 years have highlighted the educational potentials of mobile devices) towards a mature phase where students and, above all, teachers, will consider it as a learning methodology which complements, supports, enriches and sometimes substitutes more traditional learning strategies. A further step towards this transition is related to the advances in the technological development of mobile devices in the last decade, which have made it possible the commercial availability of smartphones with good computation capabilities , which are getting more and more popular amongst young people. Through the support of a smartphone, a walk around a city can turn into an opportunity for learning and it is not necessary to organize it in advance, as teachers use to do in traditional school trips. Indeed, the most popular mobile stores already include, in their catalogs, several applications providing specific information about hundreds of cities in the world. This information can be used to support the visit of a city successfully, but the scope of these applications rarely extend beyond their use as tourist guide. Specifically to their educational use, the information provided by these applications is usually extracted from proprietary data source, and cannot be easily customized to be really suitable for learning settings. Consequently, teachers wishing to organize learning experiences around the city have to prepare learning content in advance, and maintain it during the whole lifespan of the application. In this abstract, we present MeLOD, a mobile learning environment, which exploits the huge amount of dataset in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud to overcome the previous issues, by providing contextualized updated information based on students location. The position of the student sent by the mobile device is used to interlink Geonames, DBpedia and Europeana datasets to provide information about all the interesting cultural heritage sites close to the student. Moreover, students social activities like voting and commenting are used to enhance the knowledge base of the environment and to provide recommendations for next students visits. A prototype of the MeLOD mobile application has been developed for iOS devices and it is available for free on the Apple Store. More information about the environment are available at: http://melod.pa.itd.cnr.it/ The MeLOD environment is composed by two main modules: a mobile application, with a friendly user interface, that shows the information to the students during their visit, and a set of web services that elaborate the requests coming from the mobile application to provide interlinked information from different open datasets. The main datasets exploited by the MeLOD environment are (at the time of writing) three: DBpedia, Geonames and Europeana. Moreover, in the last few years, many municipalities, in the world in general and in Italy in particular, are releasing their data as Open Data. For instance the municipality of Palermo has already released the data about historical buildings in open format. These data contain information related to opening hours, entrance costs, closing day, and other information under the responsibility of the municipality, thus this data can be really useful to enhance the description already available on the datasets of the LOD cloud (such as DBpedia and Europeana). The MeLOD environment have been designed with the aim of: - providing support for personalized learning experiences. In particular, users of the MeLOD environment can select their preferences related to language, categories of interest and preferred media type. It is important to highlight that the content is not prepared in advance in several languages but the increasingly number of translation of the DBpedia ontology are exploited to provide localized content according to the language selected by the user. Users can select their preferred topic categories from a list retrieved from the main topic classifications of the DBpedia category graph, some examples of categories are: Education, Geography, History, Arts and Life. Finally, users can select their settings related to the preferred media type. In this way they can decide to receive contents in different formats (only text, text and images, all multimedia formats) depending on the technical capabilities of their device or the reliability of the network (GPRS, 3G, Wi-fi). - providing geo-located information depending on the mobile learners localization by exploiting the Linked Open Data capabilities. In particular, MeLOD uses the services of the GeoNames API to establish whether Wikipedia pages concerning cultural heritage sites are physically located nearby the user position. The list of these Wikipedia entries is used to access the corresponding resource on the DBpedia ontology, so that the structured format of the DBpedia ontology can be exploited to improve the information delivered to the users. - supporting social learning activities making explicit the ties between the profile of the users and their interaction with other users and the content they access. In particular the social activities of voting and commenting performed by users during a visit of the city have been taken into consideration. These activities are used to feed new knowledge into the student profile. Data regarding the cultural heritage visited by each user, the educational materials accessed by him/her, the votes and comments published by the learners, in relation to the time when and location in which every single activity takes places provide feedback to the learners and teachers, and can activate recommender system based on users preferences.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
