2009 bernardescardosodias.pdf

7/25/2019 2009 BernardesCardosoDias.pdf

1/4

Building a Metrological Knowledge with Video Learning Object Ontology

A. T. Bernardes1, C. A. Cardoso1, and S. A. Dias1

1 INMETRO - CICMA Capacitating Centre, Duque de Caxias, RJ - Brazil.

The present paper introduces a multimedia environment management project proposition based on Video Learning Object,

as one activities implemented by the Capacitating Centre of National Institute of Metrology, Standardization and IndustrialQuality of the Federative Republic of Brazil - Inmetro/Cicma. We intend here to discuss a method to create VLO (Video

Learning Object) and define an Ontology framework, witch will allow us to define the relations between the themes andcreate organized knowledge, what will be visualized by a Conceptual Map in front-end multimedia application.

Keywords: Learning Object, Video Learning ObjectVLO, Distance Education, Instructional Video, Semantic Ontology,Learning Object Database, Video Database

1. Introduction

The use of video in educational process has been increasing exponentially with decrease of the cost of hardware

processing, storage devices, cameras and others tools. Also the increase of Internet bandwidth contributed to popularize

these media. To create, edit and deliver such media became today, as we can see in websites as YouTube, easy and

highly attractive besides assuming a crescent role in information delivery in our digital society.

With the increase of video production, several solutions have been presented to deal with ways to manage video as an

instructional resource, and metadata indexation has been a strong contribution to it.

The use of video in the educational process has been as shown to be a motivational tool, as well as to be effective in

the training process as a way to demonstrate any kind of procedural skill, well shown through this visual method.The present paper introduces a multimedia environment management project proposition based on a Video Learning

Object, as one activities activity implemented by the Capacitating Center of National Institute of Metrology,

Standardization and Industrial Quality of the Federative Republic of Brazil - Inmetro/Cicma.

The outline of this paper is as follows: introduce the Brazilian Metrological System through the Inmetro and its

network the Ipems, followed by the role of Cicma on the Metrology enabling process on this system and in Distance

Education activities; we then present our project proposition, the subject of this paper, its justification and goals, andfinally discuss the decision to adopt the building of the Metrological domain through a an Ontology.

2. Contextualizing the Inmetro-Cicma

The actual Federative Republic of Brazil structure of Metrology and Standartization was created in 1973 as part of

Federal Government effort to develop the Brazilian scientific and industrial technological base to enhance the economyoverall to orient to exportation field. Based on a policy of Importation Substitution, the seventies in Brazil was marked

by the strong State participation in economy to secure strategic growing of industrial infrastructural development. This

technological and industrial growing and development capability was based upon an increase of need for

interoperability, standardization and overall conformity with patterns and process. [1]

The definition of a Metrological Policy and the creation of CONMETRO at end of 1970 created the base for

construction of Metrological Network System the SINMETRO, with the Inmetro as standards and specification

definition, headquarters. The local state agencies called Ipems have the role to supervise the products, stores and

factories to keep conformity with the metrological standards.Inmetro committed to training people at states Ipems offering to them capacitating training in metrology field. To

reach this role, Inmetro has been developing training systems and certificating those agents that will have a role to

supervise the Metrological Conformity at weight instruments, gas pump, taximeters, sphygmomanometer, urban radar

control and so on.

The creation of Cicma as part of Inmetro structure was a strategy to centralize the capacitating training process inonly one department. The Cicma have been offering Capacitating Courses to Brazilian State Metrologic agencies

(Ipems) and are able to offer the courses to all other international Metrologic agencies that have Portuguese as common

language.


2/4

With two units, one localized in Porto Alegre at Rio Grande do Sul State and other in Xrem at Rio de Janeiro State,

working with local universities as UFRS and Rio Grande do Sul and Uerj at Rio de Janeiro, Cicma is creating a synergy

with many actors developing action with goal to create conditions to Inmetro contributing to Brazilian technological

infrastructure competence expansion, strengthening and enhancement.

Beside the elaboration and implementation of the capacitating course in Metrology and Conformity Evaluation, is the

part of Cicma mission, to promote the Metrology and Conformity Evaluation culture inside the Universities andTechnical Schools; to contribute with a national effort to boost the graduation research in Metrology and Conformity

Evaluation and finally to contribute with Technological and Industrial Policy and Foreign Trade (PITCE), increasing

the Brazilian competitiveness through the technological innovation and solutions to overcome the international trade

barriers.

3. The Inmetro/Cicma Distance Education experience

Cicma actually has some courses running as Basic Class inLegal Metrology, General Metrology Course, Legal

Metrology Supervisor Agent Capacitating Program, all them based in a Distance Education platform, and they

currently are being delivered by Moodle-LMS to 6 Brazilian states Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Alagoas, Mato

Grosso do Sul, Pernambuco, Cear, and Sergipe reaching more than 300 students.

The courses are offered are a blended Distance Education methodology with attendance class inside the states Ipems,

where through the common big screen, the video class are presented, and the printed material are offer to students.

Lately the students can access from home the course resources as printed material, video class, and share thoughts and

questions through tutorial and online chats.As part of this policy, Cicma/Inmetro with partnership of National Research Network RNP given network

broadband infrastructure support, have been building 25 virtual conference rooms spread around the states Ipems

network, integrated by IVA, a teleconference tool developed by Federal Rio Grande do Sul University to integrate those

agencies in one virtual teaching network system.Consequently, the Inmetro/Cicma, this last 2 years had been working with Video Class, broadcasting TV programs,

and a Conference Video Environment, it had generated a considerable volume of video recordings leading to the need to

create solutions to manage this resource, in order to recover and reuse it. This search for a management of recording

video resource is the core of that project we now introduce here.

Since to promote the scientific research became one of the requisites of Cicma, the creation of Educational

Technology Laboratory is part of this effort in order to generate educational research related to the Metrology domainand on this scope, this present project has been proposed.

With this in mind we postulate the classification need of those videos, building a Metrology Ontology, also defining

some specifications for future video production that should obey a storyboard structure to warranty the granularity ofvideo in small information chunks. Those videos chunks will be worked as Video Learning Objects.

4. Video Learning Object - VLO

The essence of a Video as Learning Objects follow the properties of other Learning Objects (LO) as interoperability,reusability, accessibility and durability [2]. The literature about VLO [3] pointed also its temporal nature as additional

constraint, and the need of integrate it, some properties as Play, Pause, Resume, Fast, Forward, Fast Backward, Slow

Motion, and Stop beside a whole metadata structure that will classify and describe the data.

We understand how ever that VLO should follow some information architecture rules or principles or a video data

model. We point to the needs of VLO be built as a small video chunk of information with low cohesive parts.

One single chunk of video must make sense, must be an entity complete in itself, and must continue to make sense

once it will be part of any whole assembled content. The pieces of video must have loose coupling data structure toallow the easy reusability.

Our first step is to manipulate our large repository of completed videos and converting them into small video chunks

of information. After this extraction process transformation we will obtain VLOs in form of goals, definitions,

explanations, exemplifications and procedural processes, all extracted from those videos.

This is similar to a video edition process with difference being that we will keeping that separated pieces and

rendering them into a small video chunks or short video object unit as opposed to a complete video each contain several

pieces of information.

This granularity of VLOs will allow teachers, students, researchers, to combine and re-combine creating resources to

other new class to the teachers or allowing students to create their own meaningful process, manipulating the

information at their own pace.

Following by Mu [4] indications, this project will use Three-Tier Architecture with VLO as intermediate tier

connected with video metadata and a video application tier, to help search, recover and manipulate the VLO.

This application with a search query process will supply a graphic view of all semantic relationships of each VLOonce any concept is recovered. It will allow navigation into all correlated concepts, building meaningful system.

We have choose to store and deliver stream videos as Flash Video format.

With a back-end and front-end will be implemented with Shockwave format, it will allow the environment portability


3/4

once it will be based on the Moodle environment as one of several other kinds of Learning Objects.

5. Building a Metrology Ontology

We hold strongly to the idea that visual tools envision the concepts relating to each others concepts and that is helpful

in organizing knowledge and visualizing a conceptual hierarchy that leads the students toward well understanding and

memorizing.[5]Several research studies have contributed toward showing the efficaciousness of those visual tools in the learning

process, organizing and helping to create new information structures.

An ontology is basically the specification of content, in any specific domain, and the content can be represented by

the terms of this domain in relationship with each other in a semantic map.

To build an Ontology of one domain, we must define the topics or concepts that describe this domain.

On this direction we started to work with the already existent VIM International Vocabulary of Metrology Basicand General Concepts and Associated Terms [6].

The latest published version of this VIM compilation had offer us a meaningful conceptual map. Figure 1 shows a

small portion of this conceptual map, with the relationships between some concpts.

Our assumption is that this conceptual map is the key to the organizational process with the amount of Metrological

related VLOs.

A further step is to build an Ontology with VIM concepts and terms with a front-end tool, and index the VLOs

relating to each term of VIM.This application must offer the possibility of managing the VLO, adding, deleting, changing indexing and recovering

as well as defining properties and descriptions in the form of metadata.

Also the user level must have a topic map graphical view that can allow the user to select a different object to focus

and the program will recover the new associations.A hierarchical presentation will filter an appropriate amount of information shown as the user goes deeper and deeper

as he prospects for information.

The whole idea is to provide autonomy to students and a structured vision to the teacher, helping to have an

organized domain of the subject in perspective.

Figure 1: Portion of International Vocabulary of Metrology conceptual map, around the definition of quantity.

6. As a conclusion

Video Learning Objects have been produced for the first version of our course on training and qualification of legal

metrology personnel. They constitute basically as a capture of theoretical and experimental classes. So, they have a low

granularity. We are now performing the obtaining of small grains of content, following the methodoly here proposed. In

this way, the content of this paper is basically an initial propositional work.

References

[1 ] I. Trindade; M. Evangelista and R.F. Lazari,Capacitao de Metrologistas para a Rede Nacional de Metrologia Legal. Metrologia- 2003. Recife, Pernambuco.

http://www.inmetro.gov.br/producaointelectual/obras_intelectuais/9_obraIntelectual.pdf[ 2] R. McGreal. Learning Objects: A Practical Definition. in International Journal of Instructional Tecnhology & Distance Learning,

sept, 2004.

http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Sep_04/article02.htm


4/4

[ 3] A. Si ,Antonio; R.W.H.Lau, Q. Li and H.V. Leong. Modeling Video Objects in 4DIS Temporal Database System. Symposium

on Applied Computing -SAC'98, ACM 1998.http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ceilidh/SAC-Papers/Paper76/index.html

[ 4] X. Mu, Xiangming and A. Koohang. Video Learning Object Application System: Beyond the Static Reusability. Issues inInforming Science and Information Technology Volume 3, InSite 2006. Greater Manchester, England

http://informingscience.org/proceedings/InSITE2006/IISITMu127.pdf[5 ] C.S. Lee. Ontological Sharing, Granular Visualization and Reusbility of Learning Objects. In A. Koohang & K. Harman (Eds.)

Learning Objects and Instructional Design. Santa Rosa, California: Informing Science Press. 2007. Pp. 171-196.

[6 ] International Vocabulary of Metrology Basic and General Concepts and Associated Terms - VIM, 3rd edition, JCGM 200:2008http://www.bipm.org/en/publications/guides/vim.html

2009 bernardescardosodias.pdf

Documents