A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2006

Semantic Blogging is an ideal means to solve the current problem of authoring the learning objects with its lightweight publishing capabilities, low barrier to entry information, syndication and aggregation behavior and decentralized aggregation of the information. The semantic web community has promoted Topic Maps as an enabling technology to reduce semantic lacks regarding the optimization of information creation, navigation, merging and dissemination. The framework allows the author to create semi structured learning objects as topics in Topics Maps with their metadata values as the occurrences of the topics and the relationship between the topics are developed using the association types. The topic based learning objects are created which can be easily searched, navigated, aggregated and consumed by the learner. The application profile consisting LOM and Dublin Core elements solved the issue of single metadata model, which is not able to accommodate all the functional requirements of the applications. The touch graph and tree map visualization aid the learners in their learning process with different kind of visual perceptions. The proposed framework provided authors to create the learning objects without a need to have a deep knowledge of ontology and learners to consume the resources in their customized manner.