Technology Enhancing Learning: Past, Present and Future

Every year the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL) gathers state-of-the-art research in the TEL field. Eight years have passed since the first edition of this conference, resulting in over 500 research papers published and more than 1000 researchers involved. However, bringing together two different fields of study (Technology and Learning), does not necessarily imply interdisciplinary research. To inspect ECTEL’s interdisciplinarity and related facts, we dedicate this paper to study the evolution of the conference over time. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of the evolution of papers, authors and topics explored over the years. Our analysis provides an understanding of the origin of the conference and the direction that future research in TEL is moving towards. In addition to this, we built interactive online interfaces to enable researches to explore all the information pertaining to past ECTEL research. These interfaces enable users to easily browse through ECTEL papers, authors, knowledge and connections, possibly leveraging the discovery of related work and future collaborations.

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Patrick Siehndel and Ujwal Gadiraju

PDF: kawase-ectel2014

Slides: kawase-ectel2014

Visualizing Research Works in the Water Resources Industry

With the increasing practice of making data openly available, nowadays there is a growing amount of information easily available pertaining to water resources and ecology. Scientific works by researchers across the world contribute to the abundance in such data. Major challenges that emerge due to the volume of data include the discovery of useful and relevant content, as well as learning and interpretation of the various disparate content. In this work, we aim to aid researchers and interested stakeholders in understanding the vast landscape of scientific research in the water resources industry. We integrate different sources of data from the Web; journals from Elsevier, tweets from Twitter, and wikipedia annotations. We use interactive visualizations in order to engage the users and satisfy their information needs.

Online prototype: http://www.l3s.de/~kawase/vici/

DBLPXplorer: Interactive Graphical Interfaces for the Computer Science Bibliography – SHORTLISTED – PEOPLE’S CHOICE WINNER

Winners of the LinedUp Vidi challenge @ESWC2014

 

Vidi, the second of three consecutive competitions, sponsored and organized by the LinkedUp Project, had the goal to gather interesting and innovative tools and applications that analyze and/or integrate open web data for educational purposes.

With this goal in mind, L3S team of researchers (Ricardo Kawase, Ujival Gadiraju and Patrick Siehndel) proposed the DBLPXplorer, a set of interactive visualization tools to facilitate the browsing and discovery of scientific work. The work was awarded the People’s Choice Winner – a category where the winner was decided by the audience voting.

DBLPXplorer: http://linkedup-project.eu/2014/04/16/dblpxplorer/

Vidi Winners Announced: http://linkedup-project.eu/2014/05/29/vidi-winners-announced/

LinkedUp Project: http://linkedup-project.eu/

DBLPXplorer: Interactive Graphical Interfaces for the Computer Science Bibliography

Ricardo Kawase presenting @ESWC2014 LinkedUp – Vidi Challenge

Every year thousands of new research works are indexed and published online. Scientific publications involve mainly two sets of actors; namely, authors and articles. Consequently, a huge tangle of relations emerge together, where authors collaborate with several other authors and articles reference past literature. Due to this complex network, keeping up to date with the latest research in a particular field is often a time consuming task. Currently, available tools to explore such information are solely text based. The information seeker has to search, browse and navigate page by page in order to find relevant research. Yet, one cannot harness an overview of underlying networks and connections. At the same time, there is an abundance of information in the form of nearly disjoint datasets relevant to research and the actors involved in the Linked Open Data cloud. To facilitate the exploration of authors, scientific research and relations, we propose a visual exploratory interface for DBLP Computer Science Bibliography. To further enrich the data we extract authors’ keywords from the articles and additionally annotate each article with identified DBPedia entities. The presentation layer consists of several user friendly exploratory interfaces that utilize state of the art javascript library D3 (Data-Driven Documents). Our interfaces include overview of particular venues, authors’ profiles, scientific articles, relations and a knowledge base of keywords and semantic annotations. To complete our work, we expose all the enriched data as linked data. – See more at: http://linkedup-challenge.org/vidi/#DBLPXplorer

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Ujwal Gadiraju and Patrick Siehndel

Demo: http://www.l3s.de/~kawase/DBLPXplorer/

Incremental End-User Query Construction for the Semantic Desktop

This paper describes the design and implementation of a user interface that allows end-users to incrementally construct a query over the information in the Personal Information Management (PIM) domain. It allows semantically enriched keyword queries, implemented in the Semantic Desktop of the NEPOMUK Project. The Semantic Desktop user is able to explicitly articulate machine-processable knowledge, as described by its metadata. Therefore, searching this semantic information space can also benefit from the knowledge articulation within the query. Contrary to keyword queries, where it is not possible to provide semantic information, structured query languages as SPARQL enable exploiting this knowledge explicitly.

Venue:  WEBIST2009

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, Enrico Minack, Wolfgang Nejdl, Samur Araújo and Daniel Schwabe

PDF: kawase-webist2009b