KFTKGA: Knowledge Flow Tracer and Growth Analyzer for Community Learning

The advances in building learning technology now have to emphasize on the aspect of the individual learning besides the popular focus on the technology per se. Unlike the common research where a great deal has been on finding ways to build, manage, classify, categorize and search knowledge on the server, there is an interest in our work to look at the knowledge development at the individual’s learning. We build the technology that resides behind the knowledge sharing platform where learning and sharing activities of an individual take place. The system that we built, KFTGA (Knowledge Flow Tracer and Growth Analyzer), demonstrates the capability of identifying the topics and subjects that an individual is engaged with during the knowledge sharing session and measuring the knowledge growth of the individual learning on a specific subject on a given time space.

Teaching Strategies and Ontologies for E-Learning

* The work is partially suported by Russian Foundation for Basic Studies (grant 02-01-00466).

Share.TEC Portal: How the Metadata Repositories of Educational Resources Meet the Users’ Expectations

This is an extended version of an article presented at the Second International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, 11–12 September 2010.

Digital Libraries as a Social Media

This paper presents an innovative approach for enhancing digital libraries functionalities. An innovative distributed architecture involving digital libraries for effective and efficient knowledge sharing was developed. In the frame of this architecture semantic services were implemented, offering multi language and multi culture support, adaptability and knowledge resources recommendation, based on the use of ontologies, metadata and user modeling. New methods for teacher education using digital libraries and knowledge sharing were developed. These new methods were successfully applied in more than 15 pilot experiments in seven European countries, with more than 3000 teachers trained.

About Massachusetts Colleges Online June 2006 Sharing Best Practices Conference

This paper summarizes trends and issues in online learning in the United States of America as reflected in the presentations of the Massachusetts Colleges Online “Sharing Best Practices in E-Learning” Conference held on June 13-14, 2006.

Knowledge Construction Technology through Hypermedia-Based Intelligent Conversational Channel

There have been multifarious approaches in building expert knowledge in medical or engineering field through expert system, case-based reasoning, model-based reasoning and also a large-scale knowledge-based system. The intriguing factors with these approaches are mainly the choices of reasoning mechanism, ontology, knowledge representation, elicitation and modeling. In our study, we argue that the knowledge construction through hypermedia-based community channel is an effective approach in constructing expert’s knowledge. We define that the knowledge can be represented as in the simplest form such as stories to the most complex ones such as on-the-job type of experiences. The current approaches of encoding experiences require expert’s knowledge to be acquired and represented in rules, cases or causal model. We differentiate the two types of knowledge which are the content knowledge and socially-derivable knowledge. The latter is described as knowledge that is earned through social interaction. Intelligent Conversational Channel is the system that supports the building and sharing on this type of knowledge.

Online Access to the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum

Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum project aims at building a repertoire of medieval and early modern Bulgarian texts for saints in combination with ethnological data and some visual sources. A basic project task is to produce an accessible on-line digital repository of this valuable cultural heritage treasure. The paper presents the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum environment, its architecture, functional specification, application modeling process and software implementation. The paper also discusses the specifics of the ―Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum‖ project and its knowledge domain. The paper also presents the integration between the Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum and the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library, a digital library keeping rare specimens, private collections of Orthodox icons, wall- paintings and other iconographical objects, selected from difficult-to-access storages, distant churches, chapels, and monasteries, objects in a risk environment or unstable conditions.

Online Catalogue – Relics from the Bulgarian Museums and the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885

The goal of the online catalogue “Relics from the Bulgarian museums and the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885” (http://muzeini-relikvi.net) is simple – to connect museums from across the country and inspire them to collect and upload different cultural relics (in this case – relics from the Unification of Bulgaria). The idea behind this is to engage them in a culture of sharing and participating in common initiatives, where, for example, a curator from Varna will be able to see that some of the artifacts he or she needs for an exhibition are in Karlovo or Plovdiv.

Towards Wider Sharing of Iconographical Art Content

Information and multimedia technologies that have been developed during the past couple of years provided new e-tools to memory institutions (viz. museum, libraries, galleries, etc.), reviving the valuable treasure made by generation of people. Digital libraries (DLs) are such powerful contemporary tools for cultural heritage presentation, preservation and archiving. However, DLs power will in-crease significantly if they use mechanisms for ubiquitous sharing of their e-artefacts and they distribute attractive content in the social networks, reflecting community demands and needs. This paper presents a service for automatic sharing of iconographical artefacts and full collections from the Bulgarian Iconographical Digital Library to selected Facebook communities. In this case the service will be used for widely promotion of knowledge about East-Christian Iconographical Art and Culture, but I could be used not only for this and not only in this domain.