The project develops a socio-technical approach to making sense of user-generated content (UGC) in order to improve simulators. We use activity theory as a conceptual framework to model different “messy” activities (such as a job interview, a business meeting or going to a restaurant in a foreign country etc.). The model is then transferred into an ontology, which is used to semantically augment content such as videos, comments, blogs and other UGC for use within a simulated learning environment. By doing so we aim to make simulations more realistic and more effective and contribute to the growing knowledge and applications of social-media and big data.
ImREAL (Immersive Reflective Experience-based Adaptive Learning) is funded from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no ICT 257831.
Karanasios, S., Thakker, D., Lau, L., Dimitrova, V., Allen , D. K., & Norman, A. (Forthcoming). Making sense of digital traces: from activity theory to ontology. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Thakker, D. A., Dimitrova, V., Lau, L., Denaux, R., Karanasios, S., & Yang-Turner, F. (2011). A Priori Ontology Modularisation in Ill-defined Domains. In I-Semantics (7th International Conference on Semantic Systems). Graz, Austria.