Several days ago, David Huynh wrote a note about introducing children
to semantic markup. I'm new to this list, but that's exactly why I'm
here!
David wrote:
"So I had this thought a while ago about elementary school / high school
education... A little naive so bear with me. There are chemistry kits,
physics kits, etc. for children to get their hands dirty with the
sciences, making volcanoes and analyzing pendulums and such. But there
is no "data kits" for children to "play" with data, making
visualizations, finding trends, spotting relationships, ... If the Web
has more reusable data to offer, perhaps we can make such "data kits"
and teach children basic data visualization and analysis at an early age ...
I know Semantic Web research tends to target serious clients such as
scientists, law makers, librarians, etc. but I think there is an
opportunity here to leverage the flexibility of SW technologies to make
data "play" a lot more fun and easy for children ... Besides, "so easy
even children can play with it" would be good PR for the Semantic Web :-)"
I am the author of the Wordsmyth Children's Dictionary-Thesaurus,
which has semantic relations marked for a significant set of terms.
i'd like to use Piggy Bank in developing an application to allow
children to collect both loosely related terms/tags (clusters) and
structured terms (concepts). These can be used in writing, search
enhancement, and concept-mapping.
1. One problem I'm having is that the RDF perspective links terms
with a URI/URL - so its primarily a metadata perspective. When a
child tags a URL (or saves a document), the terms she uses can be
linked via there association with the URL. But as far as I can tell,
the terms aren't linked via their association in the mind of the
child herself. (Please forgive me if I'm mistaken. I'm still trying
to figure out the difference between Topic Maps and RDF.)
2. A second point of inquiry is about the use of semantic relations.
Our thesaurus is marked with relations like "part of", or "used by"
or "people associated with". Piggy Bank seems to be oriented toward
collecting ("scrapping") data from web pages. But, if I'm
understanding correctly, the "microformats" for marking data on pages
isn't well developed. Is there a possible use for our set of
semantic relations in specifying a microformat for semantic relations?
Best,
Bob Parks
Visiting Scholar, Cornell University
Wordsmyth Dictionary Project
http://www.wordsmyth.net
--
* The best dictionary and integrated thesaurus on the web:
http://www.wordsmyth.net
* Robert Parks - Wordsmyth - (607) 272-2190
* "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." (LW) And to
imagine new forms of life is to anticipate the language for living
that life.
* "Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however,
is to change it." (KM) And the best way to change the world is to
imagine a better form of life, and hone your words as tools for
living that life, in that world. This deeper structure of
communication is the highest calling of a wordsmyth._______________________________________________
General mailing list
[email protected]
http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
