Friday 20th of december, IE doctorate student Alejandra Segura presented her thesis defense in the Rectorate building of the University of Alcala. This research work, supervised by IE member Salvador Sanchez and Manuel E. Prieto from the University of Castilla la Mancha, aimed to propose a strategy for query expansion based on domain ontologies. According to this work, it is possible to find an strategy allowing instructional designers to find objects in a repository relevant enough as to be reused in the design of new courses or in the composition of new, more complex resources. To achieve this goal, proposals of query expansions both in the field of information retrieval in general or specifically on learning object repositories were analyzed.
For the purpose of evaluation, an experiment in the area of genetics was designed. This experiment used the Gene Ontology as a knowledge base and the MERLOT repository as a provider of learning objects in this domain. In the picture above these lines, Alejandra during her presentation in front of the evaluation board (left).
This Thursday and Friday Athens hosts the third consortium meeting of the Organic.Mednet project. IE member Salvador Sanchez -the project coordinator who already attended the Organic.Balkanet meeting and the First Joint Workshop of the three Leonardo DaVinci projects on Organic Agriculture- , is attending the sessions. The Greek Certification and Inspection Organization (DIO) is hosting the meeting.
Sessions will cover important issues such as the design of the pilot courses our agricultural experts will be giving to farmers in Greece, Spain and Turkey next spring, the agreement on technical decissions related to the MOLE platform, the decission on having a new silent partner on board -TSRI, who will be providing solutions for sustainability issues-, and the organization of the Organic.Mednet european workshop that will take place in Switxerland in June. As in the other meetings in this project, we enjoyed a very nice athmosphere as well as a very good disposition from everyone to do their best in the benefit of our project. In the picture below, a photo with all the attendees, including Alain Sandoz from our silent partner Prodague, who was in one of our project meetings for the first time. Unfortunately, Juan Manuel Dodero from TSRI -the soon to come new silent partner- had to flight back to Spain before we could take this photo.
Representatives of the project partners posing outside DIO offices in Athens
Monday and Tuesday this week Athens is hosting the third consortium meeting of the Organic.Balkanet project. IE member Salvador Sanchez is attending the sessions together with TSRI representative Juan Manuel Dodero, who is presenting his association to the consortium to explore the possibility of having TSRI on board as a silent partner. Very important issues need to be decided upon, such as the sustainability strategy, the train the trainers event (which will likely take place in Maribor next June), the way we will use MOLE in the project, the design of the pilot trials, etc. In the picture below, a moment of the Tuesday morning session.
One of the sessions of the project in GRNet premises
