Group Meeting March 30, 2007

presenter: Sergey Sosnovsky
topic: Ontological Technologies for User Modeling

once upon the time....while ontologies meet user modelling

firstly, Sergey briefly described the definition/design/history of user modelling and introduce the most frequent used technologies in user modelling.
he mentioned that ontoligies may specifically help in representation, elicitation, application technologies.
secondly, Sergey explained ontologies in semantic web, light-weight/heavy-weight ontologies and multi domain ontologies.

so, how ontologies can help user modelling???
a. ontology overlay UM
b. perosonal ontology views, including subset of concepts from the domain ontology, part of the domain ontology and individual network of concepts
he also brought up the discussion regarding to share ontologies and gave examples
1. OWL-OLM system visualizes the personal ontology view
2. Foxtrot system visualize the sets of concepts
c. ontologies for UM mining

Experiment Design:
a student has some c knowledge and then shift to learn java. there are some share concepts between these two. the suggestion is to use ontologies mapping. use GLUE algorism to calculate the relevancy between C and java. (due to time limit, Sergey didn't drill into this section, please refer to ppt file from paws website)
the point is to find out is it better in the transition from C to java manually than automatically?
discussion:
1. why not try pairwised comparison??
2. this is the case of C and java, they have similar case, but how to make it more generalizable?
3. if the domain is the same, how to make the ontology mapping much more accurately?