The Ensemble Project: Using Fedora to Support the Development of the Semantic Web for Education

Agustina Martinez, Patrick Carmichael and Louise Corti

University of Cambridge & University of Essex

The Ensemble Project Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case

Based Learning 3 Year, £1.5 Million ESRC/EPSRC Project: Research,

Development and Implementation (2008-2011) “working with teachers and students in

undergraduate and postgraduate courses to explore both the nature and role of the cases around which learning is focused, and the part that emerging semantic technologies can play in supporting this learning”• A big, happy interdisciplinary and

multi-institutional extended family …

• Website: http://www.ensemble.ac.uk2 Open Repositories, May 18-21 2009

Semantic Web Technologies Backend: archiving systems and

tools for data management Digital repositories and libraries, with

data and/or metadata in differing formats

Web services: lookups, converters, searches (i.e. external data providers)

Middleware: data aggregation and semantic data management Triplestore: large data aggregators

containing data, metadata, vocabularies, ontologies and sets of rules

Endpoints and APIs to allow querying the Triplestore

Frontend: presentation and visualization of data Web Interfaces, portals, visualization

tools, personal information managers

Open Repositories, May 18-21 20093

Fedora Configuration 1: Basic Search

FEDORA

One Fedora Object

API-A “GET”

OAI-PMH Feed

DC

RELS-EXT

XLS

Inline RDF

4 Open Repositories, May 18-21 2009

Fedora Configuration 2: RI Search

FEDORA

API-A “GET”

OAI-PMH Feed

DC

RELS-EXT

XLS

Inline RDFMulgara Triplestore

RI Search

5 Open Repositories, May 18-21 2009

Fedora Configuration 3: Custom search

FEDORA

API-A “GET”

OAI-PMH Feed

DC

RELS-EXT

XLS

Inline RDFMulgara Triplestore

Custom Search

SPARQLEndpoint

6 Open Repositories, May 18-21 2009

Sparql Endpoint UG Plant Science

Fieldwork Plant Distribution in the

Mediterranean Draws on the GBIF data

bank Aggregates data so

queries can run across them, and then offers visualization of the results

The data is accessed through an SPARQL ‘Endpoint’

7 Open Repositories, May 18-21 2009

What’s next

Educational Evaluations Archive ESDS Archive: ‘The Edwardians: Family Life

and Work Experience Before 1918’ Global Events: Earthquakes

Open Repositories, May 18-21 20098

Summary

Fedora Digital Repository provides a framework to store large and heterogeneous data Not only access to the metadata descriptions but

access to the actual data Data structured and defined in semantic-ready

format Triplestores like Mulgara enable to aggregate and

reason across different data sources Visualization and presentation tools

Process semantic-ready data and present the information in different formats

9 Open Repositories, May 18-21 2009

Questions

Open Repositories, May 18-21 200910