A Giant EduGraph

Hi all,

Really exciting stuff so far! (Can we make this a week-long event?)

Here’s what I’m up to, thinking about, and hoping to get guidance about from the Manhattan-Project-scale brainpower at THATCamp.

I’ve been working on ways to use semantic web stuff to expose and connect more info about what actually goes on in our classes, and especially in our WPMU environment, UMWBlogs. So far, I’ve been slowly working on scraping techniques and visualizations of the blog data at Semantic UMW. It sounds like this is similar stuff to Eric’s interest and Sterling’s interest — making connections — but in the domain of students and teachers and what they study.

The next phase of it is to get from the blog to the classroom. I want to ask and answer questions like:

  • Who’s studying the Semantic Web?
  • Is anyone teaching with “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”?
  • Anyone teaching from a Constructivist viewpoint?
  • What graduation requirements can I meet through courses that study things I’m interested in?
  • Can I study viral videos and meet a graduation requirement at the same time?
  • I’m a recruiter with a marketing firm. I need someone who has used Drupal, and is familiar with Linked Open Data.

I’d love to brainstorm about other kinds of questions/scenarios that people would like to answer!

(Here‘s a test/demo of an earlier version, with a handful of both fake and real data. Hopefully I’ll have demos of the updated version ready to roll by THATCamp.)

Part of the mission, and one of the things I’d like to hear thoughts about, is a types classification for the things that classes study. Here’s the run-down of it right now. Love to talk about where this succeeds and fails at being a general vocabulary for what classes study. — maybe even whether there are things in LOC I need to learn from?

Agent (Person / Group)
Culture
Era
Language
Perspective
Phenomenon
–Social Phenomenon
–Natural Phenomenon
Place
Practice
Object
–Artifact
–Natural Object
Tool
Document
Work

So, that’s the kinds of stuff I’d like to share and get feedback about.

I’ve got a handful of posts on this idea (warning! some contain serious RDF geekery, some do not).

And for the folks who are interested and are familiar with SPARQL, here’s an endpoint containing the current state of the vocabs, in graphs named www.ravendesk.org/univ# www.ravendesk.org/univ_t# . Also a set of sample data in graph example.university.edu/rdf/

2 Responses to “A Giant EduGraph”

  1. Eric Johnson Says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 11:10 pm

    This is great stuff, Patrick. I just wish I had more active semantic web know-how so I might have more immediately constructive comments along those related technical lines. But my reading of your initial vocabulary list is that it’s clearly got the highlights of what classes study–I just ran through a couple of my old courses in my mind to see if I could fit the subjects/approaches into your ontology and they worked quite nicely. It might even be possible to simplify slightly here and there–collapsing “document” and “work” into a single category, for instance (I’m not suggesting it necessarily needs to be done for those, just that it may be possible). And I keep looking at “tool” to see if it’s simply another form of practice, but I do see why they would be different. Is “concept” or “idea” something that would fit, or is that too nebulous?

    In any case, I’m all for discussions of ways to formulate and visualize connections between related things–I look forward to more discussion!

  2. patrickmj Says:
    June 2nd, 2009 at 7:47 am

    Eric,

    Many thanks! I’m glad to hear that it seemed to work for your courses. That’s exactly the kind of feedback and discussion I’m hoping for at THATCamp (and in the blog).

    The Work vs. Document distinction comes out of trying to make this play nicely with other ontologies out there, especially Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, where a Work is the high-level abstraction — like “Frankenstein” — and the Document (FRBR calls it a Manifestation) is the concrete publication.

    yeah…I’m wrestling with the Tool vs. Practice distinction myself. Hopefully that can also make for good discussion.