Automatic and manual annotation using flexible schemas for adaptation on the semantic desktop

Abstract

Adaptive Hypermedia builds upon the annotation and adaptation of content. As manual annotation has proven to be the main bottleneck, all means for supporting it by reusing automatically generated metadata are helpful. In this paper we discuss two issues. The first is the integration of a generic AH authoring environment MOT into a semantic desktop environment. In this setup, the semantic desktop environment provides a rich source of automatically generated meta-data, whilst MOT provides a convenient way to enhance this meta-data manually, as needed for an adaptive course environment. Secondly, we also consider the issue of source schema heterogeneity, especially during the automatic metadata generation process, as semantic desktop metadata are generated through a lot of different tools and at different times, so that schemas are overlapping and evolving. Explicitly taking into account all versions of these schemas would require a combinatorial explosion of generation rules. This paper investigates a solution to this problem based on malleable schemas, which allow metadata generation rules to flexibly match different versions of schemas, and can thus cope with the heterogeneous and evolving desktop environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.