SWEL: Ontologies and Social Semantic Web for Education

Welcome to the SWEL Portal!

This portal is a successor of the Ontologies for Education (O4E) Portal. The O4E portal was a collaborative project between Winston-Salem State University, University of Pittsburgh and Saint-Petersburg State Polytechnic University. The main goal of the project was to collect and disseminate web resources in the field of application of ontologies and relevant technologies for the modern educational perspectives. The portal was topic map-driven. To structure the field, we developed the O4E ontology and indexed relevant resources with concepts of this ontology. The portal contained ontology and Semantic Web-related papers presented at 8 Workshops and 3 special journal issues on Application of Semantic Web Technologies to Web-based Education.

In order to make O4E a community site, where community members can post O4E related articles and comment on them, we moved the O4E collection to this wiki-style portal. The Portal was first implemented in XWiki, but was recently moved to Drupal. Drupal allows categorizing articles not only with tags but by using taxonomies (categorical hierarchies). We presented the O4E ontology as such an hierarchy, so you can use either the concepts of this ontology or your own tags to tag the articles. For convenience, you can refer to the ontology in the attached file, if a category name is not clear.

We believe that only collaborative efforts of the SWEL community can keep this repository, which proved to be a valuable aid in the work and research of the community members, 'alive' and current. You have to be a member of the SWEL Authors' group in order to be able to add or edit articles in the SWEL blog. If you want to be a member of the group, please register and select  "Join SWEL Authors' group". A decision will be mailed to you shortly. You have to be registered also in order to be able to post comments on articles.