Building: Amoxcalli Buildings (Science Department)
Room: Anfiteatro Alfredo Barreda
Date: 2013-08-20 04:20 PM – 05:40 PM
Last modified: 2013-06-20
Abstract
Open Access is an important movement which aims to achieve free and open availability of research papers on-line. Similarly, the trend towards openness can be seen in other areas including on-line education. This includes the emergence of the Coursera platform, MIT Open Access courseware or recently launched FutureLearn.
First Pan-European Learning Service in the Field of Genetics (Eurogene) was a 36 months project supported by the European Commission aimed at sharing and reusing multimedia multilingual educational resources in human genetics. The project consortium consisted of 21 partners, mostly universities and research laboratories that offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in genetics. One of the key objectives was to create a community of educators who would openly share their resources. To support this goal, the Eurogene platform (http://eurogene.open.ac.uk) for sharing educational resources has been implemented. The content can be submitted as text (documents, presentations), images or videos in 10 European languages - English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Czech, Lithuanian, Greek and Russian. Machine readable text is automatically annotated in terms of genetic concepts defined in two ontologies. The Eurogene multilingual ontology consists of about 2100 genetic concepts expressed by 20,000+ verbal terms in all supported languages. The submitted resources are also annotated using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) - the world most comprehensive medical ontology developed by the US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md. In addition, the domain of human genetics is organized as a topic hierarchy and each submitted resource is associated with one or more topics. At the top level the hierarchy branches into clinical/medical, statistical and molecular genetics; the total hierarchy includes over 200 topics. Ontological annotation is used to calculate semantically related materials across all languages. Content is machine-translated to all languages for which the translation engine is available. The translation is performed using the SYSTRAN machine translation software. The multilingual Eurogene ontology is used to inform the translation engine about genetic-specific terms. Educational content is divided into 6 academic levels. Content quality assurance is the responsibility of the European Society of Human Genetics.
Users can query the system using genetic terms, free text or metadata. For retrieved resource, semantically similar content is offered by the Eurogene recommender system. Eurogene includes a number of filters – the user can choose the language, academic level and the format of retrieved resource. Retrieved resources can be organized into “Learning packages” – sequences of resources that cover some theme, for example as a support for a course.
The content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. The platform has been launched in 2009. Currently it contains about 2000 textual resources, over 500 videos, 264 learning packages, 35 images and the reference to about 70 external resources found on the web. The content has been accessed from 165 countries.