[iDC] mapping dependency relation

[Nagarjuna G]

Dear colleagues,

I must first of all express my gratitude to the invitation forwarded
by Trebor Scholz, whom I met recenlty in Barcelona during the mozilla
drumbeat event, to contribute to this mailing list.

In this note I wish to introduce you the project we are currently
working on: mapping dependency relations among the learning objects.
The expected outcome is a non-linear learning sequences in the form of
roadMap (sequences leading to a destination), roadAheadMap (sequences
that one may pass through having reached a destination) and a merged
dependency map (provides non-linear curriculum sequence). The project
is online at http://www.gnowledge.org/.  A recent version of the same
portal with SVG version (not yet stable) can be seen from
http://atlas.gnowledge.org/

If you have access to recent Mozilla based browsers (such as firefox),
you can try the following links:

 1. http://atlas.gnowledge.org/Data/images/12675_depmap.svg

 2. Warning very large map: http://atlas.gnowledge.org/Data/merged/MergedMap.svg

We do not yet have sufficient data from all domains of knowledge. We
have built the portal to support collaboration.  Visitors to the site
can contribute to change, delete or add new nodes online. While we
continue to make the site work better, I wish to seek your comments
and suggestions on the project.

We are soon going to extend the project to wikipedia pages, by mapping
the current page with the pages to be read before reading the current
page. When we have such a metadata, software agents (such as browsers)
can automatically guide the visitors to previous or next pages
facilitating navigation. We suggest that online courses can be
designed by using the dependency maps.

At the portal if you follow the software tab, you can see the
dependency maps of
software (harvested from Debian GNU/Linux operating system.)

Recently we have written another paper addressing the semantic web
community: http://gnowledge.org/~nagarjun/cs-lta-dependency-paper.pdf

The motivation behind this project is explained in this paper:
http://gnowledge.org/~nagarjun/collaborative-LTS-wpversion-preprint.pdf
published by the journal: Mathematics Teaching-Research Journal
Online, Vol-3, N3 2009.

We studied the debian dependency relations and developed a mathematical
model based on the data: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.4904

Since this is the first time I am posting to this list, a line of
introduction about me: I am a biologist and a philosopher working as a
science educationist at the
http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/people/academic/nagarjuna-g.  I work with
teachers and students of both rural and urban India to promote the use
of free learning studios (such as sugar labs
e.g. http://sugarlabs.org).  Our team works in the gnowledge lab in
Mumbai http://lab.gnowledge.org.

--
GN