1. Open Rubrics and
the Semantic Web
Brian Panulla
Panulla Information Systems
Megan Kohler
Pennsylvania State University
Open Ed 2010
The Seventh Annual Open
Education Conference
2-4 November, 2010
Barcelona, Spain
2. Open Ed 2010
About Us
Megan Kohler
msm26@psu.edu
Brian Panulla
Twitter: @bpanulla
(c)2010 Google, Imagery (c)2010 TerraMetrics, NASA, Map data (c)2010 Europa Technologies, Google, INEGI, AND
3. Open Ed 2010
What is a Rubric?
• Education/Teaching instrument
• Tries to measure learning
▫ Self-assessment
▫ Evaluation (grading)
4. Open Ed 2010
Benefits of Rubrics
• Consistency in grading
• Efficiency in reviewing students’ work
• Customized feedback
• Scalability for large course sizes
5. Open Ed 2010
Rubrics on the Web
• Presentational formats
▫ PDF
▫ MS Word
▫ Excel
▫ HTML
• Difficult to read with software
• Proprietary formats
▫ “Walled Gardens”
• Limited portability / linkability
7. Open Ed 2010
Why open rubrics?
• Shareable, portable
• Machine-readable
• Linkable like The Web
▫ Build libraries of feedback / comments
• Semantic Web?
8. Open Ed 2010
Three things the SW is not:
1. Semantic HTML
2. Artificial Intelligence
3. Magic
9. Open Ed 2010
New W3C Languages
▫ Resource
Description
Framework (RDF)
▫ RDF Schema
▫ Web Ontology
Language (OWL)
Yes, rly.
10. Open Ed 2010
The SW is infrastructure
• A parallel
information
system
architecture
• Web content,
pages do not
need to
change
12. Open Ed 2010
Linked Data
• Publish/Syndicate complete information sets
• Embedded explicit semantics, unique identifiers
• Have minimal impact to other Web information
publishing
• May be static or dynamically generated
20. Open Ed 2010
Scope and Scoring
• Scope of
assessed/evaluated
work:
▫ Individual
▫ Team
▫ Peer
▫ Self
• Scoring mode of the
assignment
▫ Scored
▫ Unscored
21. Open Ed 2010
Integration
• Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec
• Creative Commons RDF
http://creativecommons.org/ns
• Dublin Core?
30. Open Ed 2010
Semantics
• Can still be misunderstood without context
I Sushi, but not in that way.
And who or what is “Sushi”?
31. Open Ed 2010
RDF: Resource Description Framework
• Fundamental knowledge representation
• Everything is a resource
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Triples
• RDF is expressed as triples:
▫ subject (“Penn State”)
▫ predicate (”is a")
▫ object (”University”)
Penn
State
University
Is a
33. Open Ed 2010
Triples
• Another example:
▫ subject (“Brian Panulla”)
▫ predicate (”presented at")
▫ object (”OpenEd 2010”)
Brian
Panulla
OpenEd10
presented At
34. Open Ed 2010
Triples to Graphs
Brian
Panulla
OpenEd
2010
Penn
State
University
Is a
Portland
State
City of
Portland
Held in
Spain
35. Open Ed 2010
Triples to Graphs
Penn
State
University
Is a
Portland
State
Is in
City of
Portland
Is in
State of
Oregon
United
States of
America
North
America
Isin
Canada
NATO
State of
Washington
State of
California
Brian
Panulla
OpenEd
2010
Held in
Spain
36. Open Ed 2010
URIs
• Resources are identified by a Uniform Resource
Identifier (URI)
http://www.psu.edu/owl/ist.owl#CollegeOfIST
http://2010.highedweb.org/sessions.rdf#TPR9
37. Open Ed 2010
RDF Schemas
• Think of classes in RDFS as sets rather than OOP
classes
• RDFS provides limited Set Theory features
▫ subClassOf
▫ subPropertyOf
▫ Domain
▫ Range
38. Open Ed 2010
Web Ontologies
• Ontologies describe meaning or intended use.
• OWL adds more expressiveness and many
aspects of formal logic to RDF.
39. Open Ed 2010
Some OWL Features
• Classes
▫ Sub-class
▫ Equivalent Classes
▫ Disjoint Classes
▫ Cardinality constraints
(max/min)
• Individuals
▫ Same Individual
• Properties
▫ Sub-property
▫ Equivalent
▫ Inverse
▫ Symmetric
▫ Transitive
40. Open Ed 2010
Resources
• Semantic Web Programming - John Hebeler,
Matthew Fisher, Ryan Blace, and Andrew Perez-
Lopez
• Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist:
Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL -Dean
Allemang and James Hendler
• Programming the Semantic Web by Toby
Segaran, Colin Evans, and Jamie Taylor
Designing With Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman, 1ed.
http://www.movieprop.com/tvandmovie/terminator/t3endoskeletons1.jpg
http://bostonist.com/attachments/Anna%20Edwards/109-gob-magic2.jpg
With the invention of the telegraph, wires were run across the United States to carry data (telegrams). The wires were run along existing right-of-ways: the rail networks already carrying people and goods. This is a good analogy for the relationship between the Semantic Web (telegraph) and the Web for people (railways).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevincollins/80010182
