Visual Browsing and Editing of TM-based Learning Repositories 1 Boriana Ditcheva & 2 Darina Dicheva 1 Columbia University, NY 2 Winston-Salem State University, WS USA

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 OR … The Long Way to a Usable TM Editing Interface: Are we halfway through? The Case of TM4L

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 Introduction TMs provide a “bridge” between the domains of knowledge representation and information management and serve as the skeleton of ontology-aware applications, including digital learning repositories The lack of convenient tools that allow authors to directly enter, modify, index, and query resources in ontology-aware digital repositories is the major obstacle to their deployment

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 TM4L An environment for building, maintaining, and using ontology-aware e-learning repositories a free tool: interface in 8 languages Users authors, with limited/no background of ontologies learners, seeking information support in their learning Functionality supports 3 interaction tasks: editing, browsing and querying

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 The Problem Ontology-aware collections are typically large and complex networks ontology engineers lack domain expertise domain expert (resource authors) lack ontology engineering skills to build them Most of existing tools assume users’ experience in structuring and classifying resources (based on specific representation models)

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 Scenario 1: Boriana wants to create a Java TM Java Ontology Expressions Arithmetic Expressions Logical Expressions Relational Expressions Java Data Types Primitive Type Reference Type  Class Type  Array Type Boriana develops ontology-driven portals Relationship: Supeclass-Subclass

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006

TM4L Interface V. 1 TM4L Editor interface is a typical tree rendering, with the left pane showing the tree and the right pane showing the properties (facets) of each selected node. The nodes of the tree are topics and the edges denote the default binary superclass-subclass association Topic attributes, resources, topic parents and relations are displayed in separate panels Four additional relationship types are predefined: part-whole, class-instance, similar-to and related-to By offering this minimal set of five predefined relation types we support TM4L authors that experience difficulties in articulating and naming relationships

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 Scenario 2: Christo wants to create a Prolog TM Prolog 1 Presentation of Prolog 1.1 What is a Prolog program  The Program  The Query 2 Facts 3 Variables and Unification 4 Rules 5 Backtracking 6 Recursion Christo teaches an AI course Relationships: Whole-Part Related

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006

Partonomy Whole-Part relationship Has an important explanatory role in e-learning context Explaining what a learning unit is about often involves describing its parts and how are they composed For example, in structuring learning material on Programming Languages in terms of its components, the learning units describing the syntax, semantics and pragmatics are part of the Programming Languages unit and not subclasses of it By emphasizing the compositional structure, the partonomy is closer to the approach normally used by instructors/authors for representing learning content

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 TM4L Interface V. 2 The same five predefined relationship types: superclass- subclass, part-whole, class-instance, similar-to and related-to. However, three different views on the topic map are supported: Taxonomy (superclass-subclass), Partonomy (part-whole) and Topic Typing (class-instance). The user chooses which view to work in and can change it at any time partonomy is the default The nodes of the tree are topics and the edges denote the default binary part-of or the relation chosen by the user (superclass-subclass or class-instance)

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006

Scenario 3: Darina wants to create a Photos TM Photos Where What kind of trip When Who on the photo What on the photo Additional info Darina travels (a lot) and makes a lot of photos Relationships: Trip-Photo Whole-Part

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006

Ontology visualization Visualization in the form of graphs helps a user comprehend and analyze information better A number of graphical interfaces available Protégé: TGVizTab, Jamballaya, and OntoViz In the area of Topic Maps: Ontopia’s Vizigator, TMNav, ThinkGraph, the LIP6’ visualization tool Most of the GUIs offer only visualization, browsing, and search capabilities Some interfaces also provide editing functionality, e.g. IsaViz, OntoViz, ThinkGraph Usually no support for synchronized textual editing

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 TM4L Visual Editing Summary Functionality Create a new topic Rename topic Delete topic along with its occurrences and associations Connect topics with an existing association Connect topics with a new association (incl. asso type defining) Delete association Synchronized with the textual editing pane

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 Conclusion Automatic topic map construction is not yet an alternative to the manual educational TM design Automatic TM acquisition – an expensive operation with limited reliability Even if initially accurate and complete, TMs need modifications / adaptations reflecting their evolution To foster the development of Topic Maps-based e- learning applications, authors need adequate authoring/editing environments Use of a balanced cooperative modeling & construction approach TM4L proposes browsing and editing “in one view” authoring environment

TMRA 2006, Leipzig, Oct 11-12, 2006 Conclusion (cont’d) TM4L supports three interaction tasks: editing, browsing and querying Undergoing work on querying Tolog queries Template-based queries Relations queries Resource queries Context queries Paper at the Semantic Web User Interaction workshop at ISWC 2006, Athens, USA, November 6 th, 2006 Much more research needed for designing elegant and efficient interfaces that provide multiple views on a collection and offer users different perspectives on a selected entity