Papers' PDF files and PP presentations posted (Go to Program)

 SWEL'09 Workshop Proceedings (a single pdf file)

SWEL'09 Workshop Photos

Recent research on Web-based educational systems attempts to meet the fast growing needs and expectations of the education community with regard to e-learning efficiency, flexibility, and adaptation by employing ontologies and Semantic Web standards and paradigms. These advanced technologies aim at providing more intelligent access to and management of Web information and semantically richer modeling of the applications and their users. An important target for educational Web application researchers and developers today is to provide means to unite, as much as possible, the efforts in creating information and knowledge components that are easily accessible, shareable, reusable and modifiable by others. Within the educational field, this motivates efforts to achieve semantically rich, well-structured, standardised and verified learning content. Ontologies and Semantic Web standards allow achieving such reusability, shareability and interoperability among educational Web resources. Conceptualizations, ontologies and the available Web standards such as XML, XTM, RDF(S), OWL, OWL-S, RuleML, LOM, SCORM and IMS-LD allow specification of components in a standard way.

The notion of Social Semantic Web describes an emerging design approach for building Semantic Web applications which employs Social Software approaches. Social Semantic Web systems are usually characterized through their emphasis on collaborative creation, usage and continuous refinement of Semantic Web structures by groups of humans. Social Semantic Web systems typically elicit domain knowledge through semi-formal ontologies, taxonomies or folksonomies.

Ontologies, the Semantic Web, and the Social Semantic Web offer a new perspective on intelligent educational systems by supporting more adequate and accurate representations of learners, their learning goals, learning material and contexts of its use, as well as more efficient access and navigation through learning resources. They advance the state-of-the-art in intelligent educational systems development, so as to achieve improved e-learning efficiency, flexibility and adaptation for single users and user communities (learners, instructors, courseware authors, etc).

The SWEL'09@AIED'09 workshop will focus on the best practices of using ontologies, Semantic Web and Social Semantic Web technologies for knowledge representation, adaptation and personalization in educational settings. We will discuss lessons learned, benefits and further steps to be undertaken.

SWEL'09@AIED'09 will be seventh in the series, following the successful workshop on Concepts and Ontologies in Web-based Educational Systems, held in conjunctions with ICCE'2002 in Auckland, New Zealand, the three sessions of SWEL'04 (in conjunction with ITS'04, AH'04, and ISWC'04), the three sessions in 2005 (in conjunction with AIED'05, ICALT'05, and K-CAP'05), the session in 2006 in conjunction with AH'06, the session in 2007 in conjunction with AIED'07 and the session at ITS 2008. It has an established audience and a Web portal hosting related resources, the Ontologies for Education Portal  (http://o4e.iiscs.wssu.edu/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Articles").

The workshop goals are:

• To discuss the current state-of-the-art in using ontologies and Semantic Web standards in e-learning applications.
• To attract the interest of the related research communities to the problems in the educational Social Semantic Web and serve as an international platform for knowledge exchange and cooperation between researchers.

Workshop topics of interest include, but are not restricted, to: