Leveraging social and semantic components in adaptive environments

In a Web 3.0 perspective, web sites and portals require design elements that make them executable environments (following W.L. Hoschs layering: read-only Web 1.0 readwrite Web 2.0 read-write-execute Web 3.01). A number of interface and software components have been implemented for providing such elements, with various appraisals with respect to their effectiveness in interaction and communication tasks, such as, e.g., navigation, retrieval, learning. In this paper, I’ll address an innovative element for the design and implementation of Web 3.0 executability in the context of a learning environment: a semantic layer for supporting tag annotation. We have applied these elements in the project 150 Digit, a web portal designed for (primary, middle, and high) school classes to virtually interact (also in a 3D environment) with the exhibitions that celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italy unity (http://www.150digit.it). In particular, I’ll describe the ontology-based recommendation strategies for tags incorporated in 150 Digit and discuss the results of an evaluation carried out in a real setting. 150 Digit displays the exhibits and the related documents, such as the curators’ notes, some learning objects created by the classes about the displayed items, multimedia presentations created by the teachers about 150th anniversary themes, etc. 150 Digit encourages the active participation of the users (students, teachers, other registered users) in tagging, voting, and commenting the exhibits and in creating, uploading, and tagging new contents. Tag recommendations support the active participation of the users helping the user to select relevant tags for both an exhibit and a newly uploaded material. Tag recommendations aim at introducing new connections over the site contents, and expanding the semantic categorization of the exhibitions from the categories provided by the curators to the semantics emerging from the users tags thus supporting from a 2.0 to a 3.0 perspective. As shown by [2], semantic tools that exploit taxonomic knowledge already provide an external grounding for the relations among tags that emerge in a folksonomy, opening the way to the integration of these two sources of information. The semantic layer of 150 Digit consists of a categorization of the exhibits (also applied to user-contributed