Semantic Annotation and Search for Educational Resources Supporting Distance Learning

Abstract

Multimedia educational resources play an important role in education, particularly for distance learning environments. With the rapid growth of the multimedia web, large numbers of education articles video resources are increasingly being created by several different organizations. It is crucial to explore, share, reuse, and link these educational resources for better e-learning experiences. Most of the video resources are currently annotated in an isolated way, which means that they lack semantic connections. Thus, providing the facilities for annotating these video resources is highly demanded. These facilities create the semantic connections among video resources and allow their metadata to be understood globally. Adopting Linked Data technology, this paper introduces a video annotation and browser platform with two online tools: Notitia and Sansu-Wolke. Notitia enables users to semantically annotate video resources using vocabularies defined in the Linked Data cloud. Sansu-Wolke allows users to browse semantically linked educational video resources with enhanced web information from different online resources. In the prototype development, the platform uses existing video resources for education articles. The result of the initial development demonstrates the benefits of applying Linked Data technology in the aspects of reusability, scalability, and extensibility