Downscaling information systems

for educationChristophe Guéret (@cgueret)

Data Archiving and Networked Services

DANS is een instituut van KNAW en NWO

What do you mean "Downscaling" ?

● Alternative to up/out scaling platforms when the cost of doing it becomes too high

● "Cost" in the wide sense ○ Loss of expressivity via harmonization○ Loss of privacy○ Loss of consistency / incompatible semantics○ Hardware costs○ Infrastructural costs○ Cultural incompatibility○ ...

Up / out scaling

● Get more and more data into one system● Scale vertically (up) or horizontally (out)

Down scaling

● Instead of one big (cluster) system, use a swarm of smaller systems

● Aim at highest meaningful granularity

2 downscaled systems for education

● Information system for researchers willing to study Worldwide academic activity

● ~2M young learners willing to go social with digital media, but without Internet

Diversity aware publication ofactivity of research institutions

Context

● Millions of researchers active Worldwide

● Represents lot of information about○ Positions○ Teaching activities○ Equipment○ Discoveries○ ...

● Potential high value in sharing all that data and mining it

Problems

● Lots of name-centric, thus highly ambiguous, data sets

● Different conceptual spaces

● Different positions that not always correspond○ "Maître de conférences" ~ "Universitair Docent" ~

"Assistant professor" ?

Towards THE information system (?)

● Try to be the "Facebook for researchers"● Eventual focus on sub-parts of the data

or THE ontology (?)

● Focus on the terminology, allow for different data stack (including non Web based)

Users end-up with a tough choice

● Do you prefer too specific or too generic ?

● Workaround: formats roundtripping

But data does not travel well...

● Publications from Frank van Harmelen● Decreasing number from system to system

148 38 13

Downscaling RIS

● Some of the harmonization high costs○ Large ontologies are hard to design○ Tradeoff coverage VS expressivity○ Large amount of data○ Lack of incentives to update one platform + branding

and reporting issues playing against

● Alternative○ Rely on a data ecosystem○ Use several, layered ontologies

A research information ecosystem

Core ontology + national extensions

● Global scale insights and low level details

● Take advantage of reasoning

Cloud-less social interaction

Context

● XO laptop given to 2M kids aged 6-12

● Low-end hardware (~ old smartphone)

● Educational software based on constructivism

● Communication via Mesh-networking

The environment "Sugar"

Activities in Sugar

● A Sugar activity combines the concepts of “document” and “application” into a single object

● Activities can be easily shared between neighbouring computers

● Activity instances are associated with the document they let the user work on

Sharing activities

Journal of activity usage

Limitations of current data stack

● Data sharing limited to synchronous interaction

● Data isolated in silos

● No remote access to data created within a Sugar instance

● Social activity bounded by the classroom

Let's improve this, Web 2.0 way !

● Create a central server on the Cloud and define an API

● Create activities interacting via the API● Add a Web frontend for authentication and

adjust ACLs for the API

+ + =

Won't work because...

● Lack of stable, cheap, connection to Internet

● Lack of relevant content on the Web to justify getting a connection

● Issues with having kids on social networks

● (Besides, potentially hard to find a business model for sharing kids' work)

Downscaled alternative

● Turn every XO into a self-contained data publisher/consumer

● Apply Linked Data principles to achieve decentralised data integration

More information

● Collection of presentation about this and other topics○ http://www.slideshare.net/cgueret

● Blog about making data sharing a reality for everyone○ https://worldwidesemanticweb.wordpress.com/

● christophe.gueret@dans.knaw.nl