Learning Spaces for Knowledge Generation

As the Internet is becoming the main point for information access, Libraries, Museums and similar Institutions are preserving their collections as digital object repositories. In that way, the important information associated with digital objects may be delivered as Internet content over portals equipped with modern interfaces and navigation features. This enables the virtualization of real information exhibition spaces rising new learning paradigms. Geny is a project aiming at defining domain-specific languages and developing tools to generate web-based learning spaces from existent digital object repositories and associated semantic. The motto for Geny is “Generating learning spaces to generate knowledge”. Our objective within this project is to use (i) ontologies—one to give semantics to the digital object repository and another to describe the information to exhibit—and (ii) special languages to define the exhibition space, to enable the automatic construction of the learning space supported by a web browser. This paper presents the proposal of the Geny project along with a review of the state of the art concerning learning spaces and their virtualization. Geny is, currently, under appreciation by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), the main Portuguese scientific funding institution.