A semantic approach to cross-disciplinary research collaboration

Along with the latest developments in ICT, more specifically Social Media and Web 2.0 tools, there is a tendency towards the use of online services in research and education. This is often referred to as Research 2.0 and Technology Enhanced Learning. Web 2.0 tools are especially useful in cases where experts from different disciplines want to collaborate. There is need for an integrated method that embeds these services in research and learning processes, because it is a laborious task for researchers and learners to check and use all varying types of tools and services. In this paper we explain a flexible model that uses state-of-the-art semantic technologies to model both structured and unstructured research data. The research data is extracted from many online resources and Social Media. We implement learning objects as an abstraction of the semantically modeled research data. We propose an environment that improves the scientific research and learning process by allowing researchers to efficiently browse the information and concepts represented as learning objects.