Learning Object Annotation in
Agricultural Learning Repositories
Hannes Ebner1, Nikos Manouselis2, Matthias Palmér1,
Fredrik Enoksson1, Nikos Palavitsinis2, Kostas Kastrantas2,
Ambjörn Naeve1
1
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden
2
Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET), Greece
The 9th IEEE International Conference on Advanced
Learning Technologies (ICALT)
July 15-17, 2009. Latvia, Riga.
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Overview
• Organic.Edunet – Project Overview
• Content Repository – Conceptual Overview
• Metadata Annotation
• Interoperability
• Interfaces
• Current Status
• Conclusions
2

Organic.Edunet
A Multilingual Federation of Learning Repositories with
Quality Content for the Awareness and Education of
European Youth about Organic Agriculture and Agroecology
• Consortium with 16 project partners from 10 countries
• Focus on:
– Interoperability between digital collections of learning
resources on organic agriculture and agroecology
– Learning resources
– Educational scenarios
– Pilot trials
3

The Big Picture
4

Content Repository -
Conceptual Overview
• Abstraction of quad store and binary data
• Separation between:
– Entry (Metametadata, ACL, ...)
– Resource
– Metadata (local, external, extracted)
• Named graphs
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Agricultural Metadata
• Decision between approaches based on LOM and DC
– CG LOM Core
– FAO Ag-LR AP
– LRE extension to LOM
• Organic.Edunet Application Profile
– Based on LOM and LRE
– Individual modifications to reflect the needs of the project
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Organic.Edunet Application Profile
• Partially the vocabularies are used from LRE v3.0
– General Coverage
– Metametadata Contribution
– Educational
• Learning Resource Type
• Intended End User Role
• Context
– Relation Kind
• Creative Commons for Rights Description
• Annotation Description holds the quality certification
• Ontology terms in Classification Entry
– Organic.Edunet Ontology
– AGROVOC (FAO)
– CABI (cabi.org)
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Metadata Annotation
• Using “Annotation Tool” based on the SHAME code library
• AJAX component, embeddable in web applications
• Automatically generated user interface
• Based on “Annotation Profiles”
• Reusable graph patterns
– Based on QEL
– Editor for generating APs (e.g. “I need dcterms:title,
dcterms:subject, foaf:Person, and lom:Contribution”
• Metadata is edited directly in the graph
• Leaves metadata outside the graph pattern untouched
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9

10

Metadata Annotation 3/3
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Ontology Terms
• Organic.Edunet Ontology
– Created by domain experts with the help of the technical
partners
– Used for the semantic search in the main portal
– Assigned like tags
– Includes predicates
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Ontology Term Annotation
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Interoperability
• RESTful interface
– {http­verb} {base­uri}/{context}/{kind}/{entry}
– Context & Entry: Integer
– Kind: entry|metadata|...
– Example: GET http://oe.confolio.org/23/metadata/2
• Support for multiple formats
– JSON/JDIL (targeted for web applications)
– LOM/XML
– RDF (based on the IEEE LTSC LOM/DCAM mapping)
– Easy to hook in additional converters
• As much HTTP as possible, e.g. content negotiation
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Harvesting / Querying
• OAI-PMH
– Supported formats
• LOM
• Dublin Core
– Both directions
• SQI
– Translated into SPARQL queries
– Layer in between SQI and SPARQL to respect the ACL
• Custom harvesters
– FAO Capacity Building Portal
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Current Status
• Intense content population phase during summer 2009
• Number of resources
– Harvested: ~6.000
– Imported: ~1.000
– Manually uploaded/annotated: ~1.000
– Target: 10.000
• Harvesting from
– Intute (~5.000)
– FAO Capacity Building Portal (~1.000)
– FAO Corporate Document Repository (~250.000) (sic!)
(planned; filtering for OA to be done)
• Harvesting by
– Organic.Edunet Main Portal
– Ariadne (planned)
– LRE (planned)
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Conclusions
• Web-based tool for learning resource annotation
• Transparent application of Semantic Web technologies
• Interoperability
– Open standards used wherever possible
– LOM/XML <-> DCAM
– Linked Data
• Well prepared for federations
• Generic applicability
– Not restricted to Organic Agriculture
• Seperate reusable components
– Annotation Tool: flexible metadata editor
– SCAM: resource and metadata management framework
– Confolio: e-portfolio web application (in combination with
SCAM)
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http://www.organic­edunet.eu
Acknowledgement
The work presented in this paper was partially performed in
the Organic.Edunet project which is supported by the EC
under the eContentplus programme, Agreement No. ECP-
2006-EDU-410012.
Contact Authors
Hannes Ebner (hebner@kth.se)
Nikos Manouselis (nikosm@ieee.org)
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