Enabling Semantic-Based Ubiquitous Learning in UPnP Network Environment

Abstract

Abstract-Although Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) network is aimed basically at home/ office service automation for general purposes, it can turn out to support for ubiquitous learning objective as well, if somewhat level of semantic capability will be involved. In this paper, we discuss how the UPnP network infrastructure should be polished with the Linked Data principle for enabling semantic-based ubiquitous learning services so that sharing digital contents can be done between heterogeneous devices in an effective manner, without the need of many distinct learning standards. In addition, we describe a case of simple quiz to illustrate how the Linked Data publishing of distributed multimedia resources can be utilized in our extended UPnP architecture.Index Terms-Linked data, semantic web, ubiquitous mobile learning, UPnP. I. INTRODUCTIONSmart home network technology has provided excellent opportunities for people to experience both local services in home/office automation and public services from the Internet accesses to premises. However, for the educational purposes, smart home network is often used to facilitate for the remote access of e-learning facility, but it is rarely utilized to provide for group-based learning among computers or mobile devices at homes or enterprises. This is crucially due to the lack of adequate systems and tools, which are indeed necessary for the arrangement of ubiquitous and mobile learning inside or outside premises.Although a number of mobile learning systems have been researched to date (see [1] and Refs therein), they do not take advantages of existing ubiquitous network infrastructures designed for smart home into consideration. Therefore, their architectures are complex inevitably, due to the necessity for handling many basic (but crucial) issues, such as associating heterogeneous devices, discovering devices nearby, or enabling collaborative learning operations on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis. We argue that the complexity of these architectures can be lessened by involving the support of pervasive network infrastructure, such as Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) [2], which is targeted for smart home/office service automation.In addition, we encourage the exploitation of web-related technologies for many reasons. For instance, they are the technologies that are founded in the UPnP infrastructure for handling the problem of platform heterogeneity. Developers Manuscript received May 5, 2014; revised July 25, 2014. Atchara Rueangprathum, Somchai Limsiroratana, and Suntorn Witosurapot are with the Department of Computer Engineering, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand (e-mail: rueangprathum@gmail.com, somchai@coe.psu.ac.th, wsuntorn@coe.psu.ac.th).can then take advantages of deploying their applications via Web browsers, regardless of platform technology. More importantly, it is possible that the Semantic Web technology, such as that of Linked Data approach [3], can be involved for resource integration and generation in the Web-enabled UPnP environment. Then, learning resources a...