Figure 1: Example of novel visualization. A "nearest-neighbor" request returns the targeted concept, along with immediately related ideas from the information space regardless of map origin.
Qianyi Gu, Faisal Ahmad, Tamara Sumner |
Francis Molina |
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| Department of Computer Science | Project 2061 | |
| University of Colorado,Campus Box 430 | American Association for the Advancement of Science | |
| Boulder, CO, USA 80309-0430 | 1200 New York Avenue, NW, Washington DC, USA 20005 |
The Strand Map Service (SMS) provides educators and learners with conceptual browsing interfaces (CBI) that help them to locate and use learning resources in educational digital libraries [1] . The CBIs are constructed based on nationally recognized education standards. Their graphical representations help learners and educators to understand the learning objects and their internal relationships. To achieve these learning goals, the user needs to retrieve educational resources aligned to those objects and use the resources effectively. We have introduced a system that dynamically generates visualizations of these interfaces using SVG [2] . Because of its versatility, SVG has proved to be the ideal format for the SMS. In this paper, we will show our subsequent work on:
Different use scenarios and tasks present different concerns and constraints to users of educational resources in digital libraries, necessitating information to be presented in a variety of perspectives. To fulfill these requirements, the service described in this paper introduces a methodology for generating novel visualizations based on the same information space. For example, a "nearest-neighbor" visualization (Figure 1), is generated to present information related to a targeted concept whose related ideas originate from different strand maps.
Figure 1: Example of novel visualization. A "nearest-neighbor" request returns the targeted concept, along with immediately related ideas from the information space regardless of map origin.
Our study [3] of the cognitive process has shown that the user can more easily form search requests on web-based educational resources by browsing and interacting with visual interfaces. The conceptual browsing interfaces that we are developing have dual use: 1) to help users understand the learning objects and their relationships by providing visualizations; and 2) to facilitate the formulation of search requests for educational resources related to learning goals and the retrieval of these resources from distributed digital libraries.
For forming search requests and retrieving resources, the visual interfaces serve as a single, unified gateway for users to explore distributed resources. By interacting exclusively with our visual interfaces, the user can search directly or indirectly for distributed web resources residing in different digital libraries such as the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), the Digital Library for Earth Science Education (DLESE), the Harvard-Smithsonian Digital Video Library (HSDVL) and even in a larger domain such as Google. The retrieval process is automatically handled by services provided through the visual interfaces. Instead of forming separate search queries on different digital libraries, the user only needs to interact with the learning goals found on our visual interfaces, an approach that is very similar to "federated searching". To achieve this goal, we bind our SVG visual interfaces to web services provided by various digital libraries. We will present more technical details of this integration and the results and analysis of the retrieval. Figure 2 shows an example of visual interfaces that give search results from different digital libraries for a specific learning object.
Figure 2: Example of retrieval result. Resources related to the learning object, "Water can be a liquid or a solid ... " are retrieved from four sources: the NSDL, HSDVL, DLESE, and Google.
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