Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The semantic web has a clear place in the learning community — so says the new 2009 Horizon Report, the sixth in this collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The NMC’s Horizon Project is a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.

The annual report includes a focus on new technologies it expects to become mainstream over the next one to five years. It foresees semantic web technologies hitting the learning organization space at the tail end of that curve, on the heels of mobile, cloud computing, geo-location, and personal web technologies. Indeed, it’s the explosion in tagging, aggregating, updating and tracking one’s own and others’ dynamic content that should have a strong hand in driving semantic web applications forward, helping users realize the connections that exist in content within the appropriate contexts.

To date, the report finds that there are not many education-specific examples of semantic-aware applications. But the members of the project who compiled the report have high hopes.

“The capability of semantic-aware applications to aid in searching and finding has implications for research, especially in light of the rate at which web content is being created,” the report notes. “Semantic-aware applications hold the potential to organize and display information embedded in our data in meaningful ways that make it easier to draw connections. Semantic-aware tools to help visualize relationships among concepts and ideas are just beginning to emerge, including mashups that not only plot data on graphs or maps, but also emphasize and illustrate conceptual links.”

Jason Ohler, writing in an article in Educause Quarterly, a journal about managing and using information resources in higher education, says the semantic web’s impact for education are “profound,” affecting knowledge construction, personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational administration. He envisions the typical Google searches done by students — with the “gazillion” hits they deliver, some relevant, many not, and all taxing the patience of the user to read beyond the first couple of dozen–being replaced with a multimedia report that draws from many sources — structured data, video, even gaming scenarios played out in virtual realities — that consists of short sections that coalesce around knowledge areas that emerged naturally from the research.

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