Over on the wiki, we’ve started putting together a very basic outline of what an online course to learn about the Semantic Web and Libraries might look like. My aim is to provide something for the middle-ground of early adopters – those who are enthusiastic about these new technologies and are keen to learn more, but who might not have gotten around to sitting down with a book on RDF yet. I hope it will be a gentle introduction, not overly code-heavy, and with plenty of examples and discussion of practical applications in libraries and research.
Watch us try to build a course from the ground up or get involved and have your say about what your want to learn, or what you might teach!
More details available on the learning program page on the Semantic Library wiki.
Have you all tried looking at Connexions to build this course? cnx.org–it’s open source textbook building, with the capability to write modules for each component of a traditional course. It’s a very cool product that could use the content, since they’re trying to get to critical mass.
Thanks Melissa, that site is new to me, it sounds like it could work for this project.
Other options I’m considering are the usual open source LMSs – Sakai, Moodle or a souped-up Drupal.
Melissa,
This sounds like an exciting venture. I’d like to see the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative in this course. The DCMI has died down quite a bit over the past few years. When it first started, it had such promise. It was groomed to be the answer for the SemWeb. But alas, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to work out. Or will it?
The course should explore what it is, what challenges it had faced in implementation, and why it ultimately didn’t work. Since it was a child of librarians, there are implications to the role (and what we’ve learned from the DCMI) that librarians will play in the upcoming stages of the Web.
Allan
Sounds good Allan, thanks! Definitely a good idea to consider what has succeeded (or not) in the past.
Hi,
just have noticed that you tell a lot about Semantic Web in the context of libraries.
I would suggest to take a look at the series of tutorials on Semantic Digital Libraries I gave of the last 3 years [http://semdl.corrib.org/Tutorial/].
Also, Springer recently published our book on Semantic Digital Libraries where much can be learned about how semantic technologies can be put in to practice when building and using digital libraries.
Cheers,
Sebastian