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.

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

16. Cloud-less social interaction

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

18. The environment "Sugar"

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

20. Sharing activities

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