Search Results
An OER Recommender System Supporting Accessibility Requirements
2020, Elias, Mirette, Tavakoli, Mohammadreza, Lohmann, Steffen, Kismihok, Gabor, Auer, Sören, Gurreiro, Tiago, Nicolau, Hugo, Moffatt, Karyn
Open Educational Resources are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes and levels. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates partly due to the lack of access to education and vocational rehabilitation and training. It is not surprising therefore, that providing high quality OERs that facilitate the self-development towards specific jobs and skills on the labor market in the light of special preferences of learners with disabilities is difficult. In this paper, we introduce a personalized OER recommeder system that considers skills, occupations, and accessibility properties of learners to retrieve the most adequate and high-quality OERs. This is done by: 1) describing the profile of learners with disabilities, 2) collecting and analysing more than 1,500 OERs, 3) filtering OERs based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and 4) providing personalised OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs. As a result, the OERs retrieved by our method proved to satisfy more accessibility checks than other OERs. Moreover, we evaluated our results with five experts in educating people with visual and cognitive impairments. The evaluation showed that our recommendations are potentially helpful for learners with accessibility needs.
Toward Representing Research Contributions in Scholarly Knowledge Graphs Using Knowledge Graph Cells
2020, Vogt, Lars, D'Souza, Jennifer, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören
There is currently a gap between the natural language expression of scholarly publications and their structured semantic content modeling to enable intelligent content search. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, a search feature operating over semantically structured content is compelling. Toward this end, in this work, we propose a novel semantic data model for modeling the contribution of scientific investigations. Our model, i.e. the Research Contribution Model (RCM), includes a schema of pertinent concepts highlighting six core information units, viz. Objective, Method, Activity, Agent, Material, and Result, on which the contribution hinges. It comprises bottom-up design considerations made from three scientific domains, viz. Medicine, Computer Science, and Agriculture, which we highlight as case studies. For its implementation in a knowledge graph application we introduce the idea of building blocks called Knowledge Graph Cells (KGC), which provide the following characteristics: (1) they limit the expressibility of ontologies to what is relevant in a knowledge graph regarding specific concepts on the theme of research contributions; (2) they are expressible via ABox and TBox expressions; (3) they enforce a certain level of data consistency by ensuring that a uniform modeling scheme is followed through rules and input controls; (4) they organize the knowledge graph into named graphs; (5) they provide information for the front end for displaying the knowledge graph in a human-readable form such as HTML pages; and (6) they can be seamlessly integrated into any existing publishing process thatsupports form-based input abstracting its semantic technicalities including RDF semantification from the user. Thus RCM joins the trend of existing work toward enhanced digitalization of scholarly publication enabled by an RDF semantification as a knowledge graph fostering the evolution of the scholarly publications beyond written text.
Requirements Analysis for an Open Research Knowledge Graph
2020, Brack, Arthur, Hoppe, Anett, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph, Hall, Mark, Merčun, Tanja, Risse, Thomas, Duchateau, Fabien
Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KGs) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective by presenting a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications and outline possible solutions.
Accessibility and Personalization in OpenCourseWare : An Inclusive Development Approach
2020, Elias, Mirette, Ruckhaus, Edna, Draffan, E.A., James, Abi, Suárez-Figueroa, Mari Carmen, Lohmann, Steffen, Khiat, Abderrahmane, Auer, Sören, Chang, Maiga, Sampson, Demetrios G., Huang, Ronghuai, Hooshyar, Danial, Chen, Nian-Shing, Kinshuk, Pedaste, Margus
OpenCourseWare (OCW) has become a desirable source for sharing free educational resources which means there will always be users with differing needs. It is therefore the responsibility of OCW platform developers to consider accessibility as one of their prioritized requirements to ensure ease of use for all, including those with disabilities. However, the main challenge when creating an accessible platform is the ability to address all the different types of barriers that might affect those with a wide range of physical, sensory and cognitive impairments. This article discusses accessibility and personalization strategies and their realisation in the SlideWiki platform, in order to facilitate the development of accessible OCW. Previously, accessibility was seen as a complementary feature that can be tackled in the implementation phase. However, a meaningful integration of accessibility features requires thoughtful consideration during all project phases with active involvement of related stakeholders. The evaluation results and lessons learned from the SlideWiki development process have the potential to assist in the development of other systems that aim for an inclusive approach. © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Generate FAIR Literature Surveys with Scholarly Knowledge Graphs
2020, Oelen, Allard, Jaradeh, Mohamad Yaser, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören
Reviewing scientific literature is a cumbersome, time consuming but crucial activity in research. Leveraging a scholarly knowledge graph, we present a methodology and a system for comparing scholarly literature, in particular research contributions describing the addressed problem, utilized materials, employed methods and yielded results. The system can be used by researchers to quickly get familiar with existing work in a specific research domain (e.g., a concrete research question or hypothesis). Additionally, it can be used to publish literature surveys following the FAIR Data Principles. The methodology to create a research contribution comparison consists of multiple tasks, specifically: (a) finding similar contributions, (b) aligning contribution descriptions, (c) visualizing and finally (d) publishing the comparison. The methodology is implemented within the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a scholarly infrastructure that enables researchers to collaboratively describe, find and compare research contributions. We evaluate the implementation using data extracted from published review articles. The evaluation also addresses the FAIRness of comparisons published with the ORKG.
Compacting frequent star patterns in RDF graphs
2020, Karim, Farah, Vidal, Maria-Esther, Auer, Sören
Knowledge graphs have become a popular formalism for representing entities and their properties using a graph data model, e.g., the Resource Description Framework (RDF). An RDF graph comprises entities of the same type connected to objects or other entities using labeled edges annotated with properties. RDF graphs usually contain entities that share the same objects in a certain group of properties, i.e., they match star patterns composed of these properties and objects. In case the number of these entities or properties in these star patterns is large, the size of the RDF graph and query processing are negatively impacted; we refer these star patterns as frequent star patterns. We address the problem of identifying frequent star patterns in RDF graphs and devise the concept of factorized RDF graphs, which denote compact representations of RDF graphs where the number of frequent star patterns is minimized. We also develop computational methods to identify frequent star patterns and generate a factorized RDF graph, where compact RDF molecules replace frequent star patterns. A compact RDF molecule of a frequent star pattern denotes an RDF subgraph that instantiates the corresponding star pattern. Instead of having all the entities matching the original frequent star pattern, a surrogate entity is added and related to the properties of the frequent star pattern; it is linked to the entities that originally match the frequent star pattern. Since the edges between the entities and the objects in the frequent star pattern are replaced by edges between these entities and the surrogate entity of the compact RDF molecule, the size of the RDF graph is reduced. We evaluate the performance of our factorization techniques on several RDF graph benchmarks and compare with a baseline built on top gSpan, a state-of-the-art algorithm to detect frequent patterns. The outcomes evidence the efficiency of proposed approach and show that our techniques are able to reduce execution time of the baseline approach in at least three orders of magnitude. Additionally, RDF graph size can be reduced by up to 66.56% while data represented in the original RDF graph is preserved.
Quality Prediction of Open Educational Resources A Metadata-based Approach
2020, Tavakoli, Mohammadreza, Elias, Mirette, Kismihók, Gábor, Auer, Sören, Chang, Maiga, Sampson, Demetrios G., Huang, Ronghuai, Hooshyar, Danial, Chen, Nian-Shing, Kinshuk, Pedaste, Margus
In the recent decade, online learning environments have accumulated millions of Open Educational Resources (OERs). However, for learners, finding relevant and high quality OERs is a complicated and time-consuming activity. Furthermore, metadata play a key role in offering high quality services such as recommendation and search. Metadata can also be used for automatic OER quality control as, in the light of the continuously increasing number of OERs, manual quality control is getting more and more difficult. In this work, we collected the metadata of 8,887 OERs to perform an exploratory data analysis to observe the effect of quality control on metadata quality. Subsequently, we propose an OER metadata scoring model, and build a metadata-based prediction model to anticipate the quality of OERs. Based on our data and model, we were able to detect high-quality OERs with the F1 score of 94.6%. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Towards the semantic formalization of science
2020, Fathalla, Said, Auer, Sören, Lange, Christoph
The past decades have witnessed a huge growth in scholarly information published on the Web, mostly in unstructured or semi-structured formats, which hampers scientific literature exploration and scientometric studies. Past studies on ontologies for structuring scholarly information focused on describing scholarly articles' components, such as document structure, metadata and bibliographies, rather than the scientific work itself. Over the past four years, we have been developing the Science Knowledge Graph Ontologies (SKGO), a set of ontologies for modeling the research findings in various fields of modern science resulting in a knowledge graph. Here, we introduce this ontology suite and discuss the design considerations taken into account during its development. We deem that within the next years, a science knowledge graph is likely to become a crucial component for organizing and exploring scientific work.