Hi team, RE: Learning objects
Just noticed this thread on learning objects, and it turns out I have been looking at this area for a while now in my day job. So here is some relevant background, although obviously you need to decide how relevant this is to Cocoon. The main point about "learning objects" is they are packages, e.g. a set of HTML pages and images rather than a single page. The relationship between the pages is important. As they are packages they are transportable, unlike web pages where it is not clear what resources are required. Also people are interested in reusing learning objects, so there are some metadata schemas that facilitates learning object re-use by providing metadata about the learning object. For an introduction see "A Primer on Learning Objects." Warren Longmire. 2000. http://www.learningcircuits.org/mar2000/primer.html "All about learning objects." http://www.eduworks.com/LOTT/tutorial/learningobjects.html More Background on IMS (a metadata format for LO's) can be found here http://www.imsglobal.org Two example projects using LO's are http://belle.netera.ca/about.htm http://careo.ucalgary.ca/ RE: Complexity of Protege Personally I think Protege is probably the best open-source tool for doing ontology creation. Ontologies (in the RDF, OWL sense) are a bit of a buzzword, but the key point is tools like Protege require you to make an explicit distinction between classes and properties, unlike data formats like XML where the distinction is implicit. Protege is now a tool adopted by people working on the Semantic Web, but it predates it and is therefore a lot more user focused than lots of tools that have originated since the introduction of data formats based on RDF e.g. IsaViz. For a good introduction to Protege, see "Ontology Development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology." Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness. http://protege.stanford.edu/publications/ontology_development/ontology101-no y-mcguinness.html RE: Ontologies versus thesauri Thesauri and ontologies actually have a lot in common. Ontologies, apart from describing classes and properties, also describe their relationships a way that allows certain kinds of inferencing (machine processing). Thesauri on the other hand deal with relationships between terms, and there is a correspondance between these terms and classes used to represent property values in ontologies. However, in thesauri, the relationships between the terms are less formally defined, and hence less amenable to inferencing, but conversly seem easier to understand e.g. narrower term versus subproperty. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between ontologies and thesauri, see http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i08/Doerr kind regards, Mark Butler
