PEREIRA E SILVA, CRYSTIAM KELLE. Complexity of Digital Resources: An analysis of the complexity of digital resources through their conceptual network. Tese de Doutorado. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática (PPGI). UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO, Rio de Janeiro.
Tese Crystiam Kelle Pereira e Silva.pdf
Tese de Doutorado
Complexity of Digital Resources: An analysis of the complexity of digital resources through their conceptual networks
Author
Crystiam Kelle Pereira e Silva (UNIRIO)
Abstract
The use of digital resources as a source of information is increasingly present in the daily activities of learners, educators, and, more broadly, of people who use digital resources to learn about a particular subject. Understanding, dealing with and estimating the complexity of the digital resources is a challenge for these people when they need to select and/or create digital resources for their daily and personal demands. This research proposes to analyze the complexity of digital resources through their conceptual networks, considering various types of concepts and the relationships under four dimensions: size, interrelatedness, clustering, and uncertainty. The main goals addressed in this thesis are to identify useful features to differentiate the complexity of digital resources through the conceptual networks; propose and evaluate metrics to estimate these features; propose strategies to adapt the complexity of digital resources; and evaluate the impact of these strategies in features of complexity. This research provides an approach to structure the digital resource information as a conceptual network, using semantic technologies (Linked data and ontologies) and a set of features, metrics, and strategies to comprehend and deal with the complexity of digital resources. The features, metrics and strategies are based on a comprehensive theoretical background that includes complexity theory, its application in different contexts, educational indicators concerning educational material and instructional strategies and principles. The experimental study to evaluate the features and metrics demonstrated that they apply to analyze conceptual networks associated with digital resources and differentiate their complexity. The evaluation of the strategies showed that they are viable to adjust the complexity, although they have different impacts on features of complexity and varied applicability, advantages, and disadvantages.
Keywords:
Digital resources, Complexity theory, Features of complexity, Conceptual network, Metrics of complexity, Linked data, Knowledge graph, Ontologies.
Tese Crystiam Kelle Pereira e Silva.pdf
