For quite a long time now, I have been working here and there on a Semantic Web vocabulary for describing what actually takes place in university (and other) courses. I've gone from being confused, to being quite happy with the product, to realizing I made silly decisions, repeating as necessary, until I decided to just let it sit for a while. It was at a point that I considered bloated, tangled, and ugly. I just didn't have the chops to make to what I wanted and be happy with it.

VoCamp to the rescue!

Last weekend's VoCampDC, put together by Ed Summers at the Library of Congress and Tom Heath at Talis got together about 30 very smart and very cool people, all interested in working through vocabularies for various domains of knowledge. The largest group was working on data related to geospatial info, with smaller groups working on idea to improve the Linked Data Cloud.

Then, there was little ol' me working with Eva Blomqvist at the Semantic Technology Lab in Rome, a real ontologist who patiently set me on the right course about many things ontology-related. Thanks Eva!

She and her group have been creating a site of Ontology Design Patterns that provided huge guidance in how to think about modelling situations, and give ready-to-import classes to help jump-start ontology creation. It's a very useful tool, and I'm sure I'll be returning to it often.

Working with her and Clay Fink on day 2, we started from scratch and in two days I think we made more progress than I have in two years of thinking about this thing.

It was a bit gratifying to see that some of the most important aspects of what we came up with did pretty well align with some of the directions I had been going. But her guidance, and those design patterns made them much cleaner and straightforward. I think it will be ready to publish before too long (but with a small detour I'll get to below). Here's a few of the notable features of the ontology:

Distinction of Course and Course Realization

This was one of the patterns that I had before, though I had named them differently ("Course" and "Course Group"). Basically, a Course is the abstraction, like "English 101" and the Course Realization is an instance of it with real people -- the section of English 101 that I am taking during the Spring 2010 semester.

Course Realizations are comprised of many things

This is the biggest deviation from what I had before, and the most important. Previously, I had been thinking of the Course Realization as essentially a group of people. In this newest version, that is abstracted a bit so that the Course Realization is some thing comprised of many different aspects. The two essential things that comprise a Course Realization are Groups and Meetings. There will be much more, but that's the essential core.

Modularity of What Comprises a Course Realization

The biggest sticking point I had previously was knowing that different schools and teachers would have different ideas about what else comprises their Course Realizations. For example, for some Course Realizations it will be essential to include the course blog. For others, there would be no blog, but there will be service learning aspects. And when it comes down to the real nitty-gritty of what takes place in the class -- what they study, how they study it, etc. -- there will be far too many variations to deal with adequately in one ontology. So, I hope this new version builds in some modularity to allow easy creation of ontologies to plug into it to handle new requirements.

Separating Out Models for Courses and Course Realizations

I had always struggled with how much information about the administrative details of the Course to include (e.g., how many credits, prerequisites, etc.). I still want to do some work to create something to model that in more detail, but for now it will be punted down the road a bit.

Emphasis on the details of activities

This has always been the essential idea I was shooting for. Most data out there about courses focusses on the general metadata. I want the model to be able to express that a particular class uses Wordpress or Drupal or whatever; that it uses a particular book; that it blogs at a particular site; that it uses an electron microscope; that it studies not just the broad "American Civil War", but a particular subset of battles of the Civil War -- or the letters exchanged between Northern and Southern soldiers during the Civil War. Moreover, I want to model the products of the course -- websites built, YouTube videos created, Zotero bibliographies generated, etc.

That last bit, about punting on modelling the Courses themselves, was a bit of a watershed. With the essential tie to a university course removed, that let me think a bit more broadly about the essential features I was getting at:

• An abstract idea of a series of events that generally have a common domain of knowledge or topics.
• Realizations of that abstraction in people getting together to teach and learn about that common domain.
• But those individual realizations each have their own finer-grained variations (mostly) within that common domain.
• Key activities are people teaching and learning about various topics, objects, ideas, practices, etc.

Now. Thought of that way, it seems to me that a Course + Course Realizations has a lot in common with various other teaching and learning events, both formal and informal.

For example, take a book club. There's an abstraction there for a series of actual events: the realizations of the book club. The club might or might not be organized around a theme for the books. Each realization is about one particular book within that theme. That's a little different from a Course Realization, in that each Course Realization has many meetings throughout the semester, and each Book Club Realization has exactly one meeting, but I think the overall parallelism holds.

A lecture series? Looks like the same pattern.

A regular poetry reading series? Seems good to me.

Conferences? Unconferences? I'll put my money on it.

A knitting club that features a different technique each meeting? A three-week course in scuba certification? A series of workshops at the local art supply store? Check, check, check.

And so, at the risk of getting overly ambitious (as I am wont to do), I'm going to try to take what we created at VocampDC and abstract it to a "Teaching and Learning Series" ontology that gets imported into the ontology for university courses -- and can be imported into ontologies for this variety of other teaching and learning series. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to document some regular steps for creating a new ontology around the Teaching And Learning Series Ontology. I think that might be worth the effort, since it might offer ways to link up formal and informal teaching and learning environments.

To that end, I'll first work on the abstraction and see how it works with the university courses ontology. Then, as a test to see if it really can work to model some of these other things, I'll try out how well it works for non-course stuff. I think I'll start that step by working on a VoCamp Ontology.