The only task assigned this week was to read over "MOOCLink: Building and Utilizing Linked Data from Massive Open Online Courses," an article written by Sebastian Kagemann in conjunction with Srividya Bansal (who also happens to be the mentor for our research project). Kagemann describes his methodology and results in creating a web application that aggregates data about online courses into linked data and then uses that data to dynamically display and compare courses. He utilized RDF/XML, SPARQL, Schema.org, Protégé, Requests, Scrapy, Bootstrap, and Apache Tomcat in his technology stack. Many of these technologies I know for sure we are using (Protégé, RDF/XML, SPARQL) and many could turn out to be useful depending on the type of applications we end up creating. It is good to know that Dr. Bansal has some experience with these items and thus can guide us as we learn them. It was useful to read about Kagemann's project, as it seems to be a condensed version of what we hope to accomplish over the next two semesters. I also found his DREU blog which was also helpful to look over (at the very least, to ensure that I am on the right track with these blog posts!). I am looking forward to creating something useful with linked data that I can add to my portfolio.
This week, the team was provided with several Powerpoint presentations on XML, RDF, and OWL. Each presentation provided a basic overview of one of those three areas, although the one on RDF also discussed RDF Schema. Overall, going through the slides proved to be very useful in order to gain a better basic understanding of the technology stack we will be using in this project. To me, XML and RDF seem very logical and easy to make sense of. I am glad that RDF Schema is object oriented, because this is a very familiar concept to all three of the members on the team. In addition to the Powerpoint presentations, we were also provided with links to tutorials from www.w3schools.com. The tutorials were for XML, XML Schema, RDF, and OWL. I haven't gotten through all of the tutorials, but so far they seem to be very intuitive. I am looking forward to adding these technologies to my skill set. In terms of my expectations as we move forward, I am already looking towards the individual applications we are going to produce and trying to think of potential ideas. The usefulness of ontologies now seems obvious to me and I can see how they can be used in a multitude of ways. On Wednesday, August 27th, our team had our first meeting. Krystel and I already know each other, and Ashley and I were introduced. We discussed meeting times for the semester, project requirements, and the technology stack we will be using for this project. Everyone seems excited to begin; I, for one, and excited to work with other female programmers for the first time in my life. We had been given some articles a few weeks back to give us some background on what the semantic web (also known as linked open data) is and what it could eventually be used for. We read "Linked Data - The Story So Far" (Berners-Lee, Bizer, & Heath) as well as "The Semantic Web" (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila). As it turns out, Tim Berners-Lee (pictured above), the inventor of the World Wide Web, has since the advent of the internet imagined a semantic web as the norm and there are countless computing professionals worldwide working towards this goal. It will be interesting to explore this aspect of information technology which is very new to me. In terms of the technology stack, RDF (resource description framework) triplets were introduced, as well as several ontological languages including OWL (web ontology language). I believe that XML (extensible markup language) will be the format of choice for creating our RDFs, but I am sure we will discuss the matter further in our meeting September 1st. In the meantime, I will be rereading our project specification as well as an additional article - "The Semantic Web Revisited" (Berners-Lee, Hall, Shadbolt) - in preparation. |
AuthorBecca Little is a senior in the Software Engineering program, part of the Ira A Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Archives
March 2015
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