Capítulo 19. Semantic Tagging of Educational Organizations: A Modification of Web Communicating Practices from a Technological Perspective

Capítulo 19. Semantic Tagging of Educational Organizations: A Modification of Web Communicating Practices from a Technological Perspective

María Auxilio Medina Nieto, Jorge de la Calleja Mora

Universidad Politécnica de Puebla

Delia Arrieta Díaz, Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango

Introduction

Search engines use the descriptive data or metadata of web pages for indexing and retrieval. This document adopts a semantic tagging process —originally proposed for learning resources— to describe educational organizations. The purpose is to notice that the generation of structured data requires selecting optional properties, mandatory or recommended, depending on the level of detail of public information. A test set of ten JSON-LD scripts that inherited properties from Schema.org is the proof of concept of implementing that process. These scripts are available for web developers who decide to enrich their websites as a communicating practice in virtual environments.

The Schema organization (Schema, 2020) proposes a set of types and properties to describe structured data on the internet. Figure 19.1 shows an excerpt of the Schema main page that lists the properties for educational organizations. On one hand, an educational organization is a type of place or more precisely, a place that has a civic structure. On the other hand, this is also a specific type of organization. Schema proposes more than one hundred properties for educational organizations, some examples are alumni, name, address, slogan or logo. Thus, web developers or information designers need to analyze the properties that best suit the information needs of users.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the main activities of the semantic tagging of educational organizations and explains the content of a JSON-LD script, while Section 3 describes a website that implements this process.

Semantic Tagging of Educational Organizations

Many educational organizations disseminate their academic offerings, services, and products on websites. Frequently, these websites have search and retrieval mechanisms that help users to find relevant data.

“Semantic tagging involves professionals of the information management field, working together, to ensure information findability” (Hodden, 2008). This process is focused on the specific concepts of a document; in case of web pages, this means to a special type of annotation addressed to improve retrieval. This paper adopts a semantic tagging process originally proposed for learning resources to describe educational organizations, as originally proposed in Medina et al. (2020). The adaptation for semantic tagging of educational organizations is described using the following activities:

• Activity 1: Identification of conceptual elements and their types. This means to select useful properties and types from Schema.org to represent an educational organization and its virtual context, that is, to obtain the values for the keywords @context and @type from Schema (2020).

• Activity 2: Describe the educational organization. This consist in preparing a document with the information of the first activity depending on the level of detail of public information.

• Activity 3: Make the JSON-LD script. The acronym JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, a data serialization and messaging format to construct datasets of linked data.

• Activity 4: Validate the script. Once a script is constructed, the web developer would validate it by using the tool available at https://www.jsonschemavalidator.net/

• Activity 5: Insert the validated JSON-LD script into the web pages of the educational organization.

• Activity 6: Store the script. The digital media storage of the script is recommended for further uses.

Gasperowicz (2015) exemplifies semantic tagging with the JSON-LD format in a set of web pages. It is worth to mention that JSON-LD format is also used in web-based programming environments and to build interoperable web services; detailed information about it can be found at Sporny et al. (2020). As a way of illustration, Table 19.1 shows a simple JSON-LD script with information about uaslp university.

A simplified explanation of the script of table 1 is provided as follows: the @context element indicates the use of the Schema vocabulary to describe a type specified in the “@type”: element. The braces group properties, properties are written between double quotes at the beginning of each line, they are followed by a colon that separates their name from its value. For example, in “postalCode”: “78000”, the property is postal code and 78000 is its value.

Implementation of the Semantic Tagging
of Educational Organizations

The implementation of the semantic tagging for a test set of ten educational organizations is available at the following web page: http://www.mauxmedina.com/organizacionesEducativas.html. This page is part of the Semantic Collaborations website as illustrated in Figure 19.2 and was designed for Spanish speaking users; web developers may reuse or adapt these scripts for their own educational organizations.

Navarrete et al. (2019) made a quantitative analysis of the JSON-LD and Microdata formats focused on Schema vocabulary to describe educational resources conducted o datasets from a large web crawling corpus of 2018. Although the results showed a low use of Schema specific properties to describe educational resources, we believe that web developers will adopt semantic tagging taking into account the mandatory properties.

In conclusion, semantic tagging of educational organizations represents a content management strategy to support information findability, and produces a set of linked data useful for sementic web applications. However, this far, the implementation of this process is at the level of proof of concept, obtaining related metrics with the effectiveness and efficiency will require the registration as owner in each website.

References

Gasperowicz, E. (2015). Creating Semantic Sites with Web Components and JSON-LD. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/creating-semantic-sites-with-web-components-and-jsonld

Hodden, H. (2008). How Semantic Tagging Increases Findability. Econtent, 31, 38-43.

Medina N., M. A., Arrieta D., D., De la Calleja, M. J., Rodríguez H., R., & Ortiz C., A. (2020). Etiquetado semántico de objetos de aprendizaje [Conference presentation]. IV Workshop de Objetos de Aprendizaje, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.

Navarrete R., Recalde, L., Montenegro, C., & Luján-Mora, S. (2019). Analyzing Embedded Semantic with JSON-LD and Microdata for Educational Resources in Large Scale Web Datasets (pp. 1133-1138) [Conference presentation]. International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, Las Vegas, USA. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI49370.2019.00214

Schema. (2020). Organization of Schemas. https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html

Sporny, M., Kellogg, G., & Lanthaler, M. (2020). JSON-LD 1.0: W3C Recommendation July 16 2020. https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/