PAWS Meeting 2006-10-30

Discussion of Central Login for PAWS Adaptive applications

Overview
Centralized login is an analog of .Net Passport. There exists a unified storage of identities (here user identities) that applications refer to and rely on when it comes to registration of new users and authentication o existing.


Motivation for the centralization of a login
- a lot of users use multiple applications but have separate logins for them
- maintaining user identities at the site of each application is costly and ineffective

Note
User identity is not user model/profile, user application specific data about user is not a part of identity

User Identity fields

• Mandatory fields
• Name: Last, Given
• Login
• Password
• Recommended
• email
• gender
• Optional
• Organization/Affiliation
• City + State (Region outside U.S.)
• ZIP (Postal code)
• Country
• Comments (How did you hear about us, etc)

Incorporating group and group membership information has been postponed till further more thorough discussion.

Planned course of action
- developers should provide their user identity data for future merger
- identity data should be retrieved from Central User Identity Store and not from a local application
- conflicts in user names should be resolved in an organized fashion when needed
- interface of interaction with User Identity store to be presented later

PAWS Meeting 2006-10-23

I.
1) Peter told great news: two PAWS papers won the outstanding ELearn2006 paper awards:
- "AnnotatEd: A Social Navigation and Annotation Service for Web-based Educational
Resources" by Rosta Farzan and Peter Brusilovsky
- "Time and Structure Based Navigation in Web Lectures: Bridging a Dual Media Gap" by Robert Mertens, Peter Brusilovsky, Sergey Ishchenko and Oliver Vornberger.
Congratulations to the authors!
2) More about ELearn2006: turned out it was an earthquake there and a pretty strong one. Seems, like bad things can happen even on Havaii.
3) Finally, Peter showed the system for community-based navigation of ELearn2006 schedule. The paper about this one should win ELearn2007 outstanding Paper award ;-)


(*)
We again had problems with Java5 on Mac. Need to order PC for our future meeting or push Steve Jobs (or who is responsible?) to release Java5 for Apple.


II. Rosta's presentation about the SWEL@AH06 FOAF paper:
Authors analyzed several schemas for User(learner) characteristics representation:
- FOAF (5 categories),
PAPI (6 categories: personal, relation, sequrity, preferences, ...)
IMS LIP (11 categories)
eduPerson By Internet2 and Educause (43 elements and 2 categories)
P. Dolog's framework

They built a taxonomy of user characteristics taking FOAF as a basis and extending it with elements borrowed from other models.

Discussion (How we can use it?): probably publish FOAF profiles of CourseAgent users, then it will open CourseAgent user models and interconnect them w/ the rest of FOAF network, which allows the system to reason beyond its own knowledge.


III. Vikrant's demo. Visualization for CourseAgent.

Multidimensional visualization of a student model.
Courses are represented as dots in the space, where carrier goals are dimensions. VIBE-similar interface. Course color reflects the status: planned, not-planned, taken.