The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (http://www.auth.gr, AUTH) has decided to actively follow the contemporary demands of the (digital) Knowledge Society. In this context, AUTH has recently launched its Semantic Web Unit (http://swu.auth.gr/) the endeavor of which is to enhance the University’s data value by turning them into public data, as well as, to integrate the University resources within the Semantic Web (web 3.0) and the Linked Data Cloud (http://linkeddata.org/) using Open technologies.
In this context AUTh redesigned (http://new.auth.gr) its main web page to be based in Web 3.0 technologies (in pilot phase till October 2012). The School of Mathematics web site (http://www.math.auth.gr) will be the template for the semantic content mappings (see related video).
[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/HegJS1u_gSs” width=”100%” height=”480″]
Apart from the generic ontologies, more specific ones are also used, to represent the educational and administrative informaton of the School, as recommended by the Linked Universities Initiative (http://linkeduniversities.org/lu/)
Along the same lines, the newly reconstructed (Semantic) Website of the School of Mathematics at AUTH has introduced even more innovations. Anastasia Dimou, an MSc student at the Web Science Program, and her supervisors Dr Charalampos Bratsas and Prof. Ioannis Antoniou , got involved in the works for the SKOSification of the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC http://msc2010.org/), [2], [3]. The MSC/SKOS (http://msc2010.org/mscwork/) is broadly used to annotate the School’s publications keywords, the courses’ research fields and the Faculty’s research interests offering a richer “meaning” to the Website’s Data.
In addition, during the last three years, AUTH has been co-ordinating the mEducator project (www.meducator.net) [1], which has been one of the first projects globally to utilize semantic web services and Open Linked Data to federate different elearning platforms together, while publishing educational resource descriptions on the Web of Data (see video).
[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/HK5psY48kaQ” width=”100%” height=”480″]
Thanks to the aforementioned actions, AUTH has become a member at the aforementioned initiative (http://linkeduniversities.org/lu/index.php/members/). LinkedUniversities.org is an alliance of European universities engaged into exposing their public data, such as their publications, courses, educational resources, etc, as Linked Data.
A vital role for the Open Data promotion in Universities will be played by the CKAN platform. CKAN is already used for open scientific data. Recently, AUTH presented the Greek translation of CKAN that will be deployed in order to catalog the university’s open data. This process will begin in September 2012. (ckan.swu.auth.gr or ckan.auth.gr). CKAN can be the Open Data Hub for such institutional data. The Greek translation of CKAN was made under the collaboration of OKFN:Greece with the Web Science Master Program at AUTH
OKFN Greece supports the Aristotle University upon the implementation of aims aligned with Open Science, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
References
1. Bamidis, P., Kaldoudi, E., & Pattichis, C. (2009). mEducator: A Best Practice Network for Repurposing and Sharing Medical Educational Multi-type Content. Leveraging Knowledge for Innovation in Collaborative Networks. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 307, 769-776.
2. Lange, C., Ion, P., Dimou, A., Bratsas, C., Sperber, W., Kohlhase, M. and Antoniou, I. 2012. Bringing Mathematics To the Web of Data : the Case of the Mathematics Subject Classification Introduction : The MSC and its Applications. Elena Simperl, Others, eds.: The Semantic Web, 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) (Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, 2012), 1-15.
3. Lange, C., Ion, P., Dimou, A., Bratsas, C., Sperber, W., Kohlhase, M. and Antoniou, I. 2012. Reimplementing the Mathematical Subject Classification ( MSC ) as a Linked Open Dataset Structure of the MSC / SKOS Concept Scheme. Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM) (Bremen, Germany, 2012).
4. Bratsas, C., Chrysou, D., Eftychiadou, A., Kontokostas, D., Bamidis, P. and Antoniou, I. 2012. Semantic Web Game Based Learning: An I18n approach with Greek DBpedia. ceur-ws.org. April (2012).
5. Bratsas, C., Dimou, A., Alexiadis, G., Kavargyris, K., Parapontis, I. and Bamidis, P. 2011. Educational Semantic Wikis in the Linked Data Age : the case of MSc Web Science Program at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Linked Learning 2011: the 1st International Workshop on eLearning Approaches for the Linked Data Age (2011), 57-62.
6. Bratsas, C., Dimou, A., Ioannidis, L., Bamidis, P. and Antoniou, I. 2012. Semantic CMS and Wikis as Platforms for Linked Learning. wwwconference.org. (2012).
7. Bratsas, C., Kapsas, G., Konstantinidis, S., Koutsouridis, G. and Bamidis, P.D. 2009. A semantic wiki within moodle for Greek medical education. 2009 22nd IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (Albuquerque, NM, Aug. 2009), 1-6.
8. Ioannidis, L., Tseloudi, C. and Tsiatsos, T. 2008. Implementing collaborative e-learning functionality in Second Life. 11th International Conference on Interactive Computer aided Learning (Villach, Austria, 2008).
9. P. D. Bamidis, S. T. Konstantinidis, C. Bratsas, M. S. Iyengar, “Federating learning management systems for medical education: A persuasive technologies perspective,” cbms, pp.1-6, 2011 24th International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, 2011
10. Dionysia Kontotasiou, Charalampos Bratsas, Panagiotis D. Bamidis, “Modeling medical interventions using the semantic MediaWiki for use in healthcare practice and education,” cbms, pp.1-6, 2011 24th International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, 2011
11. Panagiotis D. Bamidis, Stathis Th. Konstantinidis, Eleni Kaldoudi, Charalambos Bratsas, Maria M. Nikolaidou, Dimitris Koufogiannis, Nicos Maglaveras, Costas Pappas, “New Approaches in Teaching Medical Informatics to Medical Students,” cbms, pp.385-390, 2008 21st IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, 2008
12. “mEducator: Multi-type Content Repurposing and Sharing in Medical Education”, funded by the Information Society eContentplus 2008 program, and Media Directorate-General, European Commission (ECP 2008 EDU 418006), www.meducator.net
