Papers by Matthias Palmér
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments
Wild, F., Kalz, M., & Palmér, M. (Eds.) (2008). Proceedings of the First International Workshop o... more Wild, F., Kalz, M., & Palmér, M. (Eds.) (2008). Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE08). September, 17, 2008, Maastricht, The Netherlands: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073. Available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-388.
Wild, F., Palmér, M., & Kalz, M. (2011). Editorial Special Issue Mashup Personal Learning Environ... more Wild, F., Palmér, M., & Kalz, M. (2011). Editorial Special Issue Mashup Personal Learning Environments. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 3(1), 1-3.
As two recent trends in Web development, Widgets and mashups, are converging, we claim that there... more As two recent trends in Web development, Widgets and mashups, are converging, we claim that there is a growing need to define a Widget Space configuration language to allow building flexible personal learning environments that could be independent of a runtime environment. By integrating the do-it-yourself dimension of a Web portal or Web mashup and the social dimension of the
A recent trend in education and in web development is to build learning environment on top of web... more A recent trend in education and in web development is to build learning environment on top of web platforms which are carefully designed to host a plurality of software components (sometimes called widgets or plugins) which can be organized or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience to create personalized environments. The degree of personalization can depend on the role of the
this paper we discuss the open source project Edutella which builds upon metadata standards defin... more this paper we discuss the open source project Edutella which builds upon metadata standards definedfor the WWW and aims to provide an RDF-based metadata infrastructure for P2P applications. Edutella is thefirst system which brings together RDF and P2P concepts and exploits their strengths in a common framework,suitable for building general schema-based P2P networks for distributed and dynamic information providers. Wedescribe
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004
In this paper we discuss the design of the SCAM framework, which aims to simplify the storage and... more In this paper we discuss the design of the SCAM framework, which aims to simplify the storage and access of metadata for a variety of different applications that can be built on top of it. A basic design principle of SCAM is the aggregation of metadata into two kinds of sets of different granularity (SCAM records and SCAM contexts). These sets correspond to the typical access needs of an application with regard to metadata, and they constitute the foundation upon which access control is provided.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005
This paper has two foci that are intended to be complementary. First, it describes Conzilla as an... more This paper has two foci that are intended to be complementary. First, it describes Conzilla as an incarnation of a concept browser. More specifically, as a technical solution for expressing context-maps, concepts, concept relations etc. Second, it introduces Conzilla as a fairly complete RDF editor which combines graph-and form-based manipulation of RDF-graphs. Apart from these foci, the main requirements for the Conzilla design is: It should serve as a collaboration tool for more or less formalized modeling techniques, most notably UML-dialects. It should simplify the task of creating information according to various metadata standards. It should support customized presentations of existing information without requiring duplication or modification of information sources. These requirements are fullfilled by choosing a three layered approach for working with semantic web information in Conzilla, i.e. the information, presentation and style layers.

Formal learning in higher education creates its own challenges for didactics, teaching, technolog... more Formal learning in higher education creates its own challenges for didactics, teaching, technology, and organization. The growing need for welleducated employees requires new ideas and tools in education. Within the ROLE project, three personal learning environments based on ROLE technology were used to accompany "traditional" teaching and learning activities at universities. The test beds at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, the School of Continuing Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and the Uppsala University in Sweden differ in learning culture, the number of students and their individual background, synchronous versus distant learning, etc. The big range of test beds underlines the flexibility of ROLE technology. For each test bed, the learning scenario is presented and analyzed as well as the particular ROLE learning environment. The evaluation methods are described and the research results discussed in detail. The learned lessons provide an easy way to benefit from the ROLE research work which demonstrates the potential for new ideas based on flexible e-learning concepts and tools in "traditional" education.
From LMS to PLE: A Step Forward through OpenSocial Apps in Moodle
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
Bringing flexibility and extensibility into Learning Management Systems) is crucial because it gi... more Bringing flexibility and extensibility into Learning Management Systems) is crucial because it gives teachers and students a free choice of technologies and educational materials they want to use for their courses. The paper presents a solution via enabling widgets (OpenSocial apps) within Moodle. Our first Moodle plug-in allows teachers to freely choose a set of tools they want to use in their courses though students can not change widgets proposed by teachers. This environment was evaluated with students within several ...

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '02, 2002
Metadata for the World Wide Web is important, but metadata for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is abs... more Metadata for the World Wide Web is important, but metadata for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is absolutely crucial. In this paper we discuss the open source project Edutella which builds upon metadata standards defined for the WWW and aims to provide an RDFbased metadata infrastructure for P2P applications, building on the recently announced JXTA Framework. We describe the goals and main services this infrastructure will provide and the architecture to connect Edutella Peers based on exchange of RDF metadata. As the query service is one of the core services of Edutella, upon which other services are built, we specify in detail the Edutella Common Data Model (ECDM) as basis for the Edutella query exchange language (RDF-QEL-i) and format implementing distributed queries over the Edutella network. Finally, we shortly discuss registration and mediation services, and introduce the prototype and application scenario for our current Edutella aware peers.
This paper discusses how Semantic Web technologies are being adopted, specialized, and put in pra... more This paper discusses how Semantic Web technologies are being adopted, specialized, and put in practice in order to set up a technical infrastructure that will facilitate sharing and reusing of learning resources. The case study is a federation of learning repositories with learning resources on agricultural topics, which is being developed in the context of the Organic.Edunet European initiative.
Learning Object Annotation for Agricultural Learning Repositories
Page 1. Learning Object Annotation for Agricultural Learning Repositories Hannes Ebner2, Nikos Ma... more Page 1. Learning Object Annotation for Agricultural Learning Repositories Hannes Ebner2, Nikos Manouselis1, Matthias Palmér2, Fredrik Enoksson2, Nikos Palavitsinis1, Kostas Kastrantas1, Ambjörn Naeve2 1Greek Research ...
Executive Summary In this deliverable, we present several specifications that are relevant to ena... more Executive Summary In this deliverable, we present several specifications that are relevant to enable the interoperation and possible synergy of learning related services and tools. WP3 will describe the models produced in WP2 in standardised machine-processable specifications. These specifications will serve as instructions to software developers and as a basis for testing of compatibility to enable smooth interoperability of the services of the ROLE infrastructure.
Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on Multimodal interfaces for automotive applications - MIAA '10
A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years to technology-enhanced learning rese... more A change in perspective can be certified in the recent years to technology-enhanced learning research and development: More and more learning applications on the web are putting the learner centre stage, not the organisation. They empower learners with capabilities to customize and even construct their own personal learning environments (PLEs). These PLEs typically consist of distributed web-applications and services that support system-spanning collaborative and individual learning activities in formal as well ...

This paper describes an approach for collaborative construction of artifacts, such as e.g. graphi... more This paper describes an approach for collaborative construction of artifacts, such as e.g. graphical maps and annotatable text documents, without requiring write-access to a common single file. Our approach is applicable to any kind of artifacts that can be divided into separate contributions, where each one is authored and stored independently, and, on request, merged into the artifact. The goal is to move col- laboration issues from the files where artifacts are expressed, to an in- formation directory. This information directory manages information around artifacts and keeps track of existing contributions to artifacts. Our prototype of such an information directory, named Collaborilla, is designed to be a flexible service, which can be updated by anyone in a wiki-style manner. With this approach, viewing a collaboratively constructed artifact gives each viewer the control of including or ex- cluding various contributions. Moreover, each viewer can easily choose to participate an...
Introducing qualitative dimensions to analyse the usefulness of Web 2.0 platforms as PLEs
International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 2011
The trends in web development of educational applications and of Web 2.0 or social applications a... more The trends in web development of educational applications and of Web 2.0 or social applications are converging. Platforms are designed to host a variety of software components (called widgets or plugins), which can be organised or combined (mashed-up) at user's convenience. Such platforms can be exploited as both personalised learning environment (PLE) and as social network applications. This article argues that six qualitative dimensions can be defined to analyse the main features of these platforms: the screen ...
International Journal of Learning Technology, 2005
Life long, flexible, collaborative, and personalized learning are words that are being increasing... more Life long, flexible, collaborative, and personalized learning are words that are being increasingly used, whenever education is discussed and designed. They express new and important demands on learning architectures, both with regard to pedagogy, organization and technology. Traditional learning architectures are based on teacher-centric and curriculum-oriented "knowledge-push". In this paper we present an infrastructure, an architecture and a number of frameworks and tools that support learner-centric and interest-oriented "knowledge-pull". We see them as a contribution to a Public e-Learning Platform, which can achieve true interoperability based on open source and open international ICT standards
This paper provides a report on the experimental collaborative and distributed development of a p... more This paper provides a report on the experimental collaborative and distributed development of a prototypic Widget-based PLE. The development process is described and detailed taking into account the requirements of a language learning scenario. First results are presented, and developer experiences are discussed critically with a focus on the development process as well as problems with current Widget technologies and interoperability

This paper introduces context-maps based on the concept browser Conzilla as a user-friendly inter... more This paper introduces context-maps based on the concept browser Conzilla as a user-friendly interface to formal knowledge that is expressed in RDF. Context-maps provide ways to visualize and edit RDF as graphs, where selected resources and statements may be presented in a styled fashion. An important problem to adress is the fact that RDF expressions are verbose, complex and not very intuitive to work with directly. Our solution, context-maps, allows parts of RDF graphs to be summarized, suppressed and presented in a form that is more comprehensible to humans. Also, context-maps support the use of richer visual languages such as UML in our presentations. In order to support various author friendly features, such as extensibility, annotation, reuse, etc., context-maps are expressed in RDF. This allows them to be embedded in the knowledge they describe, and to be processed by generic RDF tools such as low level editors and flexible search engines. Through the use of RDF, context-maps are given the necessary power and flexibility to maintain a one-to-one relationship between the visual interface and the represented formal knowledge. Context-maps make heavy use of referring techniques and matching patterns in which variables are introduced. Context-maps are additionally extended with a navigational structure which is inspired by hyperlinks. 9 we will not use the name RDF model since it might be confused with the term model in logics.
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Papers by Matthias Palmér