Abstract:

The course of Digital Photography is provided to students of Information management, Applied informatics, Travel management and other study programmes at the Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Králové. Electronic learning materials were prepared to help students to orientate themselves in plenty of resources related to history of photography, specifics of different genres of photography, guidelines for taking pictures, recommendations related to image post-processing in different graphical editors etc. A large gallery of photos is part of these materials, too. We decided to use ontologies and Topic Maps standard to better organize resources and to enable passing the course individually, according to the introductory experience and knowledge on photography, learning styles, individual preferences of students of different study programmes etc. The ontology is defined as an explicit formalization of shared conceptualization of the given domain (here it is photography). In relation to Topic Maps standard, ontology is understood as the network of topics (concepts, terms), associations (relations among these topics) and constraints clarifying properties of topics and relations. Topic Maps technology addresses problems of information and knowledge resources representation, integration and sharing in context of web-based applications. The resources (called occurrences in Topic Maps terminology) are linked to topics. It is possible to integrate resources of different types, e.g. digitalized documents or collections of web links, but also e-mail addresses of domain experts, audio and video files described by appropriate metadata etc. The network of topics and their associations define a natural navigation in resources. Moreover, predefined constraints can be used for customization of the web presentation, or for restricting the access to particular resources. Therefore we found Topic Maps standard to be applicable in e-learning in general and in our paper we describe this idea in details. Also we present practical experiences with creating of Topic Maps based repository that was prepared for the purpose of the course of Digital Photography.

Keywords:

Topic Maps, ontology, web-based application, e-learning, digital photography.