Using Knowledge Aware Design to Animate Interactions Between Sets of Areas of Interest

Case study of an application to map and explore the connections between two or more self-described areas of interest and ontologies

Systems of this type should be able to handle the following uses cases:

  • (Automated: machine reading and learning) Read in a Self-Description natural language text about research interests from students describing their “Areas of Interest” and Faculty’s “Areas of Research” in order to map them to a database of terms and ontologies to report and visualize matches.  

  • (Interactive) Select topics from lists to allow additional tagging 

  • Development of a dedicated markup language to assist both the authoring and machine learning. 

  • Machine assisted interaction which will allow the user to hone their natural language descriptions to better fit the terms and ontology of the “Areas of Research.” Early examples: 

  • “When you wrote that you were interested in Topic A, would it be correct to say that one of these also applies: X, Y or Z?”  

  • “You mention “Areas of Interest A. Our database has 3 subtopics that might be more specific … do any of these describe your interest more specifically.” 

  • Host a tree of computer assisted “Question and Answer” interactions to walk a student through their self-description, using their responses to capture and describe interests in terms of the current ontology 

  • Ability to generate a report for the student that they can store or save results in order to author, refine and change their “Areas of Interests” personal statement. 

  • Ability to allow the student to create and generate a more casual and private statement of “Areas of Curiosity” with which they can create a personal and evolving record of what they are curious about. 

  • The ability to author ad hoc, temporary, personal “Snaps Shots” that allow the student to author or capture snippets of natural language from their  class notes, journals and writings for use with the visualizations and mappings made available by the system (“dropping a class note into a smart phone app and see how it “connects.” The ability to author “areas” to add to personal versions of the ontology.  

  • The ability to author “Moments” of personal or observed “idea integration,” interdisciplinarity, cross-discipline thinking 

  • Gamification – creating “Moments” that others can explore in a game like fashion, as guides and explorers in an evolving landscape of interconnected knowledge. More -> Semantic Network As Gamified Learning Environment