Subject: Trip Report Resent-Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 22:28:35 -0500 Resent-From: Geoffrey Fox Resent-To: p_gcf@npac.syr.edu Date: Thu, 11 Nov 1999 17:30:41 -0500 From: Mehmet Sen To: gcf@npac.syr.edu, Nancy McCracken , Mehmet Sen --------------------------------------------------------------------- Trip Report by Mehmet Sen Event: WebNet '99 Conference October 24-30 1999 http://www.aace.org/conf/webnet The WebNet conference was particularly interesting regarding to the relation between conference target and the important NPAC education oriented projects, like Tango. The audience of the conference was mostly from two main fields, computer science and education, rather than any other possible impression the conference title gave. Though the perspective of the conference covers all the research related with the Internet and its technologies, a large percentage of the participants concentrated on the projects, which aim to reach new horizons in education using web technologies. Furthermore, the participants may be divided into two groups: educators and computer scientists, equally education product shoppers and sellers. In that perspective, I believe that NPAC missed an opportunity to advertise its rather technologically advanced projects other than my personal efforts to explain them to the individual people, and my presentation. On the other hand, conference was not restricted only on educational projects. There were some examples related with other computer science approaches to the Internet Technologies, e.g., database-web integration methodologies, medical applications on the www. Conference started with a mini-course about using metadata to facilitate educational resource discovery and reuse. Several presenters from the IEEE LTSC (Wayne Hodgins) , ARIADNE introduced their work and related projects like the IMS Project, Dublin Core Standard Efforts. The main empahsises of the course was two; the importance of learning is increasing rapidly where learning will equal to working soon, and the IEEE learning metadata standards will be completed very soon. Basically, IEEE metadata standards, http://ltsc.ieee.org/, cover all the related work done up to today from all over the world mentioned above. The session further mentioned IEEE Learning Object Metadata applications, tool sets, and other related issues. The papers presented in the conference categorized as in the following by conference committee: * Commercial, Business, Professional, and Community Applications * Educational Applications * Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries * Ergonomic, Interface, and Cognitive Issues * General Web Tools and Facilities * Personal Applications and Environments * Societal Issues, Including Legal, Standards, and International Issues * Web Technical Facilities Some of presented research topics are related with adaptive learning, collaborative filtering of contents, reusable learning objects, evaluation of existing learning tools to be used in a web educational environment and the methods how to integrate these tools. There were talks each morning by the invited speakers. The most interesting one was "Escaping Entropy Death: Why The Web Works For Business" by Simon Phipps, IBM UK Laboratories, UK. His perception from e-business computing model is based on the granularity. When all technology is independent, the cost of owning a solution is minimized, that is: when clear interfaces reduce inter-dependency; business/social relationships are without technical relationships; and content is without responsibility. His Solution-Centric World technologically consists of the following components: Delivery (Web Model), Program (Java Components), Data (XML & Vocabularies), Network (TCP/IP), and Security (Public Key). Another interesting part of the conference was workshops. One workshop was related with creating, managing, and delivering Web-based Instruction, authoring and delivery systems. From this workshop and previously presented papers, I got the impression that NPAC Student Records and TANGO are competitive with the ones evolved in various other projects, and mostly have better technologies inside. The other workshop was about Metadata using Resource Description Framework given by Bob Schloss, XML team leader, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA and co-chair, W3C RDF Data Model & Syntax Working Group. Bob Schloss went over RDF and make some points to understand RDF better. He emphasized that all information on the web is machine-readable but not understandable where metadata can provide the second functionality to automate processing. RDF provides interoperability for applications to exchange machine understandable information on the web. According to him: Sophisticated applications of RDF may combine metadata about the same object supplied by more than one party on the Web, selecting the optimal source for specific properties and merging the sources' expertise. Further notes from his talk is as following; A metadata framework, i.e., RDF, should be domain and application neutral, and international. RDF is a data model as an abstract, conceptual layer on top of XML. RDF is not an Object Oriented Programming system for the web but it has an extensible type system. RDF is not a DB mechanism for the web, but its notion of properties are close to that of a relation in RDBs. RDF is not a full-fledged knowledge representation system but it is approximately "propositional logic +modalities". RDF is independent of XML's syntax, but RDF and XML are complimentary on syntax and semantics issues. One another issue raised during the talk about the comparison of RDF with another existing framework, i.e., XMI. XMI has more powerful and complex programming oriented structure. Compared to RDF, XML serialization is larger and not intended to be produced without a tool, which means that XMI is not easy to use in practice. My question about the future of these two frameworks is answered as that it is uncertain but XMI may superior RDF with some possibility.