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Ahmet Soylu

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Computer and Information Science, Faculty Member

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Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

The Alan Turing Institute

Diego Calvanese

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Sarah Komla-Ebri

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Danica Damljanovic

The University of Sheffield

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Papers by Ahmet Soylu

Ontology-based End-user Visual Query Formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which

by Ahmet Soylu, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, Martin Giese, and Evgeny Kharlamov

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often... more Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users' technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users' understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world's enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity – known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems.

Experiencing OptiqueVQS: A Multi-paradigm and Ontology-based Visual Query System for End Users

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for value creation processes, such a... more Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for value creation processes, such as sense making, decision making, and intelligence analysis. Particularly, in an enterprise setting, intuitive data access tools that directly engage domain experts with data could substantially increase competitiveness and profitability. In this respect, the use of ontologies as a natural communication medium between end users and computers has emerged as a prominent approach. To this end, this article introduces a novel ontology-based visual query system, named OptiqueVQS, for end users. OptiqueVQS is built on a powerful and scalable data access platform and has a user-centric design supported by a widget-based flexible and extensible architecture allowing multiple coordinated representation and interaction paradigms to be employed. The results of a usability experiment performed with non-expert users suggest that OptiqueVQS provides a decent level of expressivity and high usability, and hence is quite promising. Keywords Visual query formulation · visual query systems · ontology-based data access · data retrieval

A Preliminary Approach on Ontology-Based Visual Query Formulation for Big Data

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013

Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for the potential of value creation ... more Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for the potential of value creation processes such as sense-making, decision making, and intelligence analysis. As such, providing friendly data access tools that directly engage domain experts (i.e., end-users) with data, as opposed to the situations where database/IT experts are required to extract data from databases, could substantially increase competitiveness and profitability. However, the ever increasing volume, complexity, velocity, and variety of data, known as the Big Data phenomenon, renders the end-user data access problem even more challenging. Optique, an ongoing European project with a strong industrial perspective, aims to countervail the Big Data effect, and to enable scalable end-user data access to traditional relational databases by using an ontology-based approach. In this paper, we specifically present the preliminary design and development of our ontology-based visual query system and discuss directions for addressing the Big Data effect.

Optique: Zooming in on Big Data

by Martin Rezk, Davide Lanti, Martin Giese, Ahmet Soylu, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, and G. Vega-gorgojo

Computer, 2015

Despite the dramatic growth of data accumulated by enterprises, obtaining value out of it is extr... more Despite the dramatic growth of data accumulated by enterprises, obtaining value out of it is extremely challenging. In particular, the data access bottleneck prevents domain experts from getting the right piece of data within a constrained time frame. The Optique Platform unlocks the access to Big Data by providing end users support for directly formulating their information needs through an intuitive visual query interface. The submitted query is then transformed into highly optimized queries over the data sources, which may include streaming data, and exploiting massive parallelism in the backend whenever possible. The Optique Platform thus responds to one major challenge posed by Big Data in data-intensive industrial settings.

Towards a Visual Annotation Tool for End-User Semantic Content Authoring

OptiqueVQS: Visual Query Formulation for OBDA

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Optique 1.0: Semantic Access to Big Data⋆

Optique 1.0: Semantic Access to Big Data⋆ The Case of Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s FactPages

by Ahmet Soylu, Domenico Fabio Savo, and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

The Optique project aims at developing an end-to-end system for semantic data access to Big Data ... more The Optique project aims at developing an end-to-end system for semantic data access to Big Data in industries such as Statoil ASA and Siemens AG. In our demonstration we present the first version of the Optique system customised for the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate's FactPages, a publicly available dataset relevant for engineers at Statoil ASA. The system provides different options, including visual, to formulate queries over ontologies and to display query answers. Optique 1.0 offers installation wizards that allow to extract ontologies from relational schemata, extract and define mappings connecting ontologies and schemata, and align and approximate ontologies. Moreover, the system offers highly optimised techniques for query answering.

Mashups and widget orchestration

by Ahmet Soylu, Felix Mödritscher, Piet Desmet, and Patrick Causmaecker

Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '11, 2011

The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data so... more The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data sources, and tools to generate new applications. Mashups are usually realized either through a seamless integration, in which only the resulting application is known by the end-users, or through integration of original applications, data sources, and tools, particularly in terms of widgets, into the same graphical space, in which participating applications and data sources are identifiable by the end-users. The former composes a unified functionality or data presentation/source from the original sources. The latter generates a digital environment in which participating sources exist as individual entities, but the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. We call such an integration widget orchestration. In this paper, we provide a holistic view on the mashup era and a theoretical grounding for widget-based digital environments, we elaborate on key challenges for realizing such environments and (semi-)automatic widget orchestration, and we introduce our solution strategies. We identified following challenges: widget interoperability, user-behavior mining, and infrastructure. We introduce functional interfaces (FWI) for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and investigate the possibility of employing workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user-behavior mining. We outline a reference platform and architecture, compliant with our strategies, to foster re-usability of widgets and development of standardized widgetbased environments. We have implemented a prototype for a Widget-based Personal Learning Environment (WIPLE) for foreign language learning in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution strategies, framework, and architecture.

How Semantic Technologies Can Enhance Data Access at Siemens Energy

by Ahmet Soylu, Nina Solomakhina, Mikhail Roshchin, and Thomas Hubauer

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Optique: OBDA solution for big data

by Johan Klüwer, Ahmet Soylu, Diego Calvanese, and Mikhail Roshchin

Accessing the relevant data in Big Data scenarios is increasingly difficult both for end-user and... more Accessing the relevant data in Big Data scenarios is increasingly difficult both for end-user and IT-experts, due to the volume, variety, and velocity dimensions of Big Data.This brings a hight cost overhead in data access for large enterprises. For instance, in the oil and gas industry, IT-experts spend 30-70% of their time gathering and assessing the quality of data . The Optique project (http://www.optique-project.eu/) advocates a next generation of the well known Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) approach to address the Big Data dimensions and in particular the data access problem. The project aims at solutions that reduce the cost of data access dramatically.

Scalable End-User Access to Big Data

by Ahmet Soylu and Diego Calvanese

Big Data Computing, 2013

This chapter proposes steps towards the solution to the data access problem that end-users typica... more

Towards Exploiting Query History for Adaptive Ontology-Based Visual Query Formulation

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2014

Grounded on real industrial use cases, we recently proposed an ontology-based visual query system... more Grounded on real industrial use cases, we recently proposed an ontology-based visual query system for SPARQL, named OptiqueVQS. Ontology-based visual query systems employ ontologies and visual representations to depict the domain of interest and queries, and are promising to enable end users without any technical background to access data on their own. However, even with considerably small ontologies, the number of ontology elements to choose from increases drastically, and hence hinders usability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method using the log of past queries for ranking and suggesting query extensions as a user types a query, and identify emerging issues to be addressed.

Why not simply Google?

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Fun, Fast, Foundational - NordiCHI '14, 2014

We demonstrate an ontology-based visual query system, namely OptiqueVQS, for end users without an... more We demonstrate an ontology-based visual query system, namely OptiqueVQS, for end users without any technical background to formulate rather complex information needs into formal queries over databases. It is built on multiple and coordinated representation and interaction paradigms and a flexible widget-based architecture.

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '13, 2013

A recent EU project, named Optique, with a strong industrial perspective, strives to enable scala... more A recent EU project, named Optique, with a strong industrial perspective, strives to enable scalable end-user access to Big Data. To this end, Optique employs an ontologybased approach, along with other techniques such as query optimisation and parallelisation, for scalable query formulation and evaluation. In this paper, we specifically focus on end-user visual query formulation, demonstrate our preliminary ontology-based visual query system (i.e., interface), and discuss initial insights for alleviating the affects of Big Data.

Visualization of networked collaboration in digital ecosystems through two-mode network patterns

by Felix Mödritscher and Ahmet Soylu

Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '11, 2011

Collaboration in Digital Ecosystems can be very complex due to varying types and numbers of actor... more Collaboration in Digital Ecosystems can be very complex due to varying types and numbers of actors and artifacts, and the many possible interactions between these entities. Hereby, network visualizations are useful for analyzing networked collaboration and consequently for supporting cognitive processes, like fostering reflection, enabling awareness in students" learning. In this paper, we examine different techniques for visualizing ICTenabled interactions in Digital Ecosystems. After giving a brief overview of related work, we argue for the application of twomode networks for visualizing patterns of networked collaboration and discuss different issues by comparing this technique to traditional visualizations.

Mashups by orchestration and widget-based personal environments: Key challenges, solution strategies, and an application

by Piet Desmet, Ahmet Soylu, and Felix Mödritscher

Program: electronic library and information systems, 2012

Çok Uluslu, İş Birlikçi, Sosyal E-Öğrenme: iCamp Örneği

by Selahattin Kuru and Ahmet Soylu

status: published, 2007

In this article, the approach of iCamp, which is a research and development project funded by the... more In this article, the approach of iCamp, which is a research and development project funded by the European Commission under the IST (Information Society Technology) programme of FP6, to social software, social learning, and interoperability concepts is discussed. The project aims at creating an infrastructure for collaboration and networking across systems, countries, and disciplines in Higher Education. Pedagogically it is based on constructivist learning theories that puts more emphasis on self-organised learning, social networking, ...

Exploiting metadata, ontologies and semantics to design/enhance new end-user experiences for adaptive pervasive computing environments

by Ahmet Soylu and Piet Desmet

Adaptive Systems and Pervasive Computing change the face of computing and redefine the way people... more Adaptive Systems and Pervasive Computing change the face of computing and redefine the way people interact with the technology. Pioneers pursue a vision that technology is seamlessly situated in people's life and adapts itself to the characteristics, requirements, and needs of the users and the environment without any distraction at the user side. Adaptive Systems research mostly focuses on individual applications that can alter their interface, behavior, presentation etc. mainly with respect to the user ...

Ontologies for Ubiquitous Adaptive Learning Environments

by Ahmet Soylu, Mieke Vandewaetere, and Piet Desmet

International Conference on Interdisciplinary Research on Technology, Education and Communication, Kortrijk, Belgium, May 1, 2010

The new vision on computing, ie Pervasive Computing [1], and the technological advancements, eg, ... more The new vision on computing, ie Pervasive Computing [1], and the technological advancements, eg, Semantic Web, re-organize the way how people use, and interact with the technology. Not surprisingly, learning is one of the domains which closely follows and even motivates such a fundamental shift. In this regard, Table 1 extended from [2] demonstrates the shift and the convergence between the learning and technology. Personalization, adaptivity and ubiquity (ie pervasiveness), within the context of this paper ...

Ontology-based End-user Visual Query Formulation: Why, what, who, how, and which

by Ahmet Soylu, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, Martin Giese, and Evgeny Kharlamov

Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often... more Value creation in an organisation is a time-sensitive and data-intensive process, yet it is often delayed and bounded by the reliance on IT experts extracting data for domain experts. Hence, there is a need for providing people who are not professional developers with the flexibility to pose relatively complex and ad hoc queries in an easy and intuitive way. In this respect, visual methods for query formulation undertake the challenge of making querying independent of users' technical skills and the knowledge of the underlying textual query language and the structure of data. An ontology is more promising than the logical schema of the underlying data for guiding users in formulating queries, since it provides a richer vocabulary closer to the users' understanding. However, on the one hand, today the most of world's enterprise data reside in relational databases rather than triple stores, and on the other, visual query formulation has become more compelling due to ever-increasing data size and complexity – known as Big Data. This article presents and argues for ontology-based visual query formulation for end users; discusses its feasibility in terms of ontology-based data access, which virtualises legacy relational databases as RDF, and the dimensions of Big Data; presents key conceptual aspects and dimensions, challenges, and requirements; and reviews, categorises, and discusses notable approaches and systems.

Experiencing OptiqueVQS: A Multi-paradigm and Ontology-based Visual Query System for End Users

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for value creation processes, such a... more Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for value creation processes, such as sense making, decision making, and intelligence analysis. Particularly, in an enterprise setting, intuitive data access tools that directly engage domain experts with data could substantially increase competitiveness and profitability. In this respect, the use of ontologies as a natural communication medium between end users and computers has emerged as a prominent approach. To this end, this article introduces a novel ontology-based visual query system, named OptiqueVQS, for end users. OptiqueVQS is built on a powerful and scalable data access platform and has a user-centric design supported by a widget-based flexible and extensible architecture allowing multiple coordinated representation and interaction paradigms to be employed. The results of a usability experiment performed with non-expert users suggest that OptiqueVQS provides a decent level of expressivity and high usability, and hence is quite promising. Keywords Visual query formulation · visual query systems · ontology-based data access · data retrieval

A Preliminary Approach on Ontology-Based Visual Query Formulation for Big Data

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2013

Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for the potential of value creation ... more Data access in an enterprise setting is a determining factor for the potential of value creation processes such as sense-making, decision making, and intelligence analysis. As such, providing friendly data access tools that directly engage domain experts (i.e., end-users) with data, as opposed to the situations where database/IT experts are required to extract data from databases, could substantially increase competitiveness and profitability. However, the ever increasing volume, complexity, velocity, and variety of data, known as the Big Data phenomenon, renders the end-user data access problem even more challenging. Optique, an ongoing European project with a strong industrial perspective, aims to countervail the Big Data effect, and to enable scalable end-user data access to traditional relational databases by using an ontology-based approach. In this paper, we specifically present the preliminary design and development of our ontology-based visual query system and discuss directions for addressing the Big Data effect.

Optique: Zooming in on Big Data

by Martin Rezk, Davide Lanti, Martin Giese, Ahmet Soylu, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, and G. Vega-gorgojo

Computer, 2015

Despite the dramatic growth of data accumulated by enterprises, obtaining value out of it is extr... more Despite the dramatic growth of data accumulated by enterprises, obtaining value out of it is extremely challenging. In particular, the data access bottleneck prevents domain experts from getting the right piece of data within a constrained time frame. The Optique Platform unlocks the access to Big Data by providing end users support for directly formulating their information needs through an intuitive visual query interface. The submitted query is then transformed into highly optimized queries over the data sources, which may include streaming data, and exploiting massive parallelism in the backend whenever possible. The Optique Platform thus responds to one major challenge posed by Big Data in data-intensive industrial settings.

Towards a Visual Annotation Tool for End-User Semantic Content Authoring

OptiqueVQS: Visual Query Formulation for OBDA

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Optique 1.0: Semantic Access to Big Data⋆

Optique 1.0: Semantic Access to Big Data⋆ The Case of Norwegian Petroleum Directorate’s FactPages

by Ahmet Soylu, Domenico Fabio Savo, and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

The Optique project aims at developing an end-to-end system for semantic data access to Big Data ... more The Optique project aims at developing an end-to-end system for semantic data access to Big Data in industries such as Statoil ASA and Siemens AG. In our demonstration we present the first version of the Optique system customised for the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate's FactPages, a publicly available dataset relevant for engineers at Statoil ASA. The system provides different options, including visual, to formulate queries over ontologies and to display query answers. Optique 1.0 offers installation wizards that allow to extract ontologies from relational schemata, extract and define mappings connecting ontologies and schemata, and align and approximate ontologies. Moreover, the system offers highly optimised techniques for query answering.

Mashups and widget orchestration

by Ahmet Soylu, Felix Mödritscher, Piet Desmet, and Patrick Causmaecker

Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '11, 2011

The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data so... more The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data sources, and tools to generate new applications. Mashups are usually realized either through a seamless integration, in which only the resulting application is known by the end-users, or through integration of original applications, data sources, and tools, particularly in terms of widgets, into the same graphical space, in which participating applications and data sources are identifiable by the end-users. The former composes a unified functionality or data presentation/source from the original sources. The latter generates a digital environment in which participating sources exist as individual entities, but the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. We call such an integration widget orchestration. In this paper, we provide a holistic view on the mashup era and a theoretical grounding for widget-based digital environments, we elaborate on key challenges for realizing such environments and (semi-)automatic widget orchestration, and we introduce our solution strategies. We identified following challenges: widget interoperability, user-behavior mining, and infrastructure. We introduce functional interfaces (FWI) for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and investigate the possibility of employing workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user-behavior mining. We outline a reference platform and architecture, compliant with our strategies, to foster re-usability of widgets and development of standardized widgetbased environments. We have implemented a prototype for a Widget-based Personal Learning Environment (WIPLE) for foreign language learning in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution strategies, framework, and architecture.

How Semantic Technologies Can Enhance Data Access at Siemens Energy

by Ahmet Soylu, Nina Solomakhina, Mikhail Roshchin, and Thomas Hubauer

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Optique: OBDA solution for big data

by Johan Klüwer, Ahmet Soylu, Diego Calvanese, and Mikhail Roshchin

Accessing the relevant data in Big Data scenarios is increasingly difficult both for end-user and... more Accessing the relevant data in Big Data scenarios is increasingly difficult both for end-user and IT-experts, due to the volume, variety, and velocity dimensions of Big Data.This brings a hight cost overhead in data access for large enterprises. For instance, in the oil and gas industry, IT-experts spend 30-70% of their time gathering and assessing the quality of data . The Optique project (http://www.optique-project.eu/) advocates a next generation of the well known Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) approach to address the Big Data dimensions and in particular the data access problem. The project aims at solutions that reduce the cost of data access dramatically.

Scalable End-User Access to Big Data

by Ahmet Soylu and Diego Calvanese

Big Data Computing, 2013

This chapter proposes steps towards the solution to the data access problem that end-users typica... more

Towards Exploiting Query History for Adaptive Ontology-Based Visual Query Formulation

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2014

Grounded on real industrial use cases, we recently proposed an ontology-based visual query system... more Grounded on real industrial use cases, we recently proposed an ontology-based visual query system for SPARQL, named OptiqueVQS. Ontology-based visual query systems employ ontologies and visual representations to depict the domain of interest and queries, and are promising to enable end users without any technical background to access data on their own. However, even with considerably small ontologies, the number of ontology elements to choose from increases drastically, and hence hinders usability. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method using the log of past queries for ranking and suggesting query extensions as a user types a query, and identify emerging issues to be addressed.

Why not simply Google?

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Fun, Fast, Foundational - NordiCHI '14, 2014

We demonstrate an ontology-based visual query system, namely OptiqueVQS, for end users without an... more We demonstrate an ontology-based visual query system, namely OptiqueVQS, for end users without any technical background to formulate rather complex information needs into formal queries over databases. It is built on multiple and coordinated representation and interaction paradigms and a flexible widget-based architecture.

by Ahmet Soylu and Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '13, 2013

A recent EU project, named Optique, with a strong industrial perspective, strives to enable scala... more A recent EU project, named Optique, with a strong industrial perspective, strives to enable scalable end-user access to Big Data. To this end, Optique employs an ontologybased approach, along with other techniques such as query optimisation and parallelisation, for scalable query formulation and evaluation. In this paper, we specifically focus on end-user visual query formulation, demonstrate our preliminary ontology-based visual query system (i.e., interface), and discuss initial insights for alleviating the affects of Big Data.

Visualization of networked collaboration in digital ecosystems through two-mode network patterns

by Felix Mödritscher and Ahmet Soylu

Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems - MEDES '11, 2011

Collaboration in Digital Ecosystems can be very complex due to varying types and numbers of actor... more Collaboration in Digital Ecosystems can be very complex due to varying types and numbers of actors and artifacts, and the many possible interactions between these entities. Hereby, network visualizations are useful for analyzing networked collaboration and consequently for supporting cognitive processes, like fostering reflection, enabling awareness in students" learning. In this paper, we examine different techniques for visualizing ICTenabled interactions in Digital Ecosystems. After giving a brief overview of related work, we argue for the application of twomode networks for visualizing patterns of networked collaboration and discuss different issues by comparing this technique to traditional visualizations.

Mashups by orchestration and widget-based personal environments: Key challenges, solution strategies, and an application

by Piet Desmet, Ahmet Soylu, and Felix Mödritscher

Program: electronic library and information systems, 2012

Çok Uluslu, İş Birlikçi, Sosyal E-Öğrenme: iCamp Örneği

by Selahattin Kuru and Ahmet Soylu

status: published, 2007

In this article, the approach of iCamp, which is a research and development project funded by the... more In this article, the approach of iCamp, which is a research and development project funded by the European Commission under the IST (Information Society Technology) programme of FP6, to social software, social learning, and interoperability concepts is discussed. The project aims at creating an infrastructure for collaboration and networking across systems, countries, and disciplines in Higher Education. Pedagogically it is based on constructivist learning theories that puts more emphasis on self-organised learning, social networking, ...

Exploiting metadata, ontologies and semantics to design/enhance new end-user experiences for adaptive pervasive computing environments

by Ahmet Soylu and Piet Desmet

Adaptive Systems and Pervasive Computing change the face of computing and redefine the way people... more Adaptive Systems and Pervasive Computing change the face of computing and redefine the way people interact with the technology. Pioneers pursue a vision that technology is seamlessly situated in people's life and adapts itself to the characteristics, requirements, and needs of the users and the environment without any distraction at the user side. Adaptive Systems research mostly focuses on individual applications that can alter their interface, behavior, presentation etc. mainly with respect to the user ...

Ontologies for Ubiquitous Adaptive Learning Environments

by Ahmet Soylu, Mieke Vandewaetere, and Piet Desmet

International Conference on Interdisciplinary Research on Technology, Education and Communication, Kortrijk, Belgium, May 1, 2010

The new vision on computing, ie Pervasive Computing [1], and the technological advancements, eg, ... more The new vision on computing, ie Pervasive Computing [1], and the technological advancements, eg, Semantic Web, re-organize the way how people use, and interact with the technology. Not surprisingly, learning is one of the domains which closely follows and even motivates such a fundamental shift. In this regard, Table 1 extended from [2] demonstrates the shift and the convergence between the learning and technology. Personalization, adaptivity and ubiquity (ie pervasiveness), within the context of this paper ...