Building a Companion Website in the Semantic Web

Description/Abstract

A problem facing many textbook authors (including one of the authors of this paper) is the inevitable delay between new advances in the subject area and their incorporation in a new (paper) edition of the textbook. This means that some textbooks are quickly considered out of date, particularly in active technological areas such as the Web, even though the ideas presented in the textbook are still valid and important to the community. This paper describes our approach to building a companion website for the textbook Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach. We use Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives to critically evaluate a number of authoring and presentation techniques used in existing companion websites, and adapt these techniques to create our own companion website using Semantic Web technologies in order to overcome the identified weaknesses. Finally, we discuss a potential model of future companion websites, in the context of an e-publishing, e-commerce Semantic Web services scenario.