Downscaling information systems for education
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This document discusses two examples of downscaling information systems for education. The first involves creating a decentralized research information ecosystem using layered ontologies to share data about academic institutions and researchers. The second involves enabling social interaction and data sharing between students using low-cost laptops without internet access by turning each laptop into a self-contained linked data publisher and consumer.
Downscaling information systems for education
- 1. Data Archiving and Networked Services Downscaling information systems for education Christophe Guéret (@cgueret) DANS is een instituut van KNAW en NWO
- 2. What do you mean "Downscaling" ? ● Alternative to up/out scaling platforms when the cost of doing it becomes too high ● "Cost" in the wide sense ○ Loss of expressivity via harmonization ○ Loss of privacy ○ Loss of consistency / incompatible semantics ○ Hardware costs ○ Infrastructural costs ○ Cultural incompatibility ○ ...
- 3. Up / out scaling ● Get more and more data into one system ● Scale vertically (up) or horizontally (out)
- 4. Down scaling ● Instead of one big (cluster) system, use a swarm of smaller systems ● Aim at highest meaningful granularity
- 5. 2 downscaled systems for education ● Information system for researchers willing to study Worldwide academic activity ● ~2M young learners willing to go social with digital media, but without Internet
- 6. Diversity aware publication of activity of research institutions
- 7. Context ● Millions of researchers active Worldwide ● Represents lot of information about ○ Positions ○ Teaching activities ○ Equipment ○ Discoveries ○ ... ● Potential high value in sharing all that data and mining it
- 8. Problems ● Lots of name-centric, thus highly ambiguous, data sets ● Different conceptual spaces ● Different positions that not always correspond ○ "Maître de conférences" ~ "Universitair Docent" ~ "Assistant professor" ?
- 9. Towards THE information system (?) ● Try to be the "Facebook for researchers" ● Eventual focus on sub-parts of the data
- 10. or THE ontology (?) ● Focus on the terminology, allow for different data stack (including non Web based)
- 11. Users end-up with a tough choice ● Do you prefer too specific or too generic ? ● Workaround: formats roundtripping
- 12. But data does not travel well... ● Publications from Frank van Harmelen ● Decreasing number from system to system 148 38 13
- 13. Downscaling RIS ● Some of the harmonization high costs ○ Large ontologies are hard to design ○ Tradeoff coverage VS expressivity ○ Large amount of data ○ Lack of incentives to update one platform + branding and reporting issues playing against ● Alternative ○ Rely on a data ecosystem ○ Use several, layered ontologies
- 14. A research information ecosystem
- 15. Core ontology + national extensions ● Global scale insights and low level details ● Take advantage of reasoning
- 17. Context ● XO laptop given to 2M kids aged 6-12 ● Low-end hardware (~ old smartphone) ● Educational software based on constructivism ● Communication via Mesh-networking
- 19. Activities in Sugar ● A Sugar activity combines the concepts of “document” and “application” into a single object ● Activities can be easily shared between neighbouring computers ● Activity instances are associated with the document they let the user work on
- 21. Journal of activity usage
- 22. Limitations of current data stack ● Data sharing limited to synchronous interaction ● Data isolated in silos ● No remote access to data created within a Sugar instance ● Social activity bounded by the classroom
- 23. Let's improve this, Web 2.0 way ! ● Create a central server on the Cloud and define an API ● Create activities interacting via the API ● Add a Web frontend for authentication and adjust ACLs for the API + + =
- 24. Won't work because... ● Lack of stable, cheap, connection to Internet ● Lack of relevant content on the Web to justify getting a connection ● Issues with having kids on social networks ● (Besides, potentially hard to find a business model for sharing kids' work)
- 25. Downscaled alternative ● Turn every XO into a self-contained data publisher/consumer ● Apply Linked Data principles to achieve decentralised data integration
- 26. More information ● Collection of presentation about this and other topics ○ http://www.slideshare.net/cgueret ● Blog about making data sharing a reality for everyone ○ https://worldwidesemanticweb.wordpress.com/ ● christophe.gueret@dans.knaw.nl