Joseph Hardin - Joe Hardin home

Joseph Hardin
Assistant Professor, School of Information Director, Collaborative Technologies Lab, Duderstadt Ctr.

University of Michigan

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Contact Info

Joseph Hardin
Media Union
Bonisteel Dr.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

hardin@umich.edu
(734) 763-3266

last update 10/23/2006

Joseph Hardin is the Director of the Collaborative Technologies Laboratory in the Media Union, and a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

He is currently the Board Chair for the Sakai project, an open source, online Collaboration and Learning Environment. See www.sakaiproject.org for more information.

Joseph has managed development of online collaboration systems for a good while, including when he was Associate Director of Software Development at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois-UC, from the early to the late 90´s. He is also a founder and board member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee, and is preparing a graduate course on the Semantic Web for this Winter.

Current Projects Highlights

Semantic Web Course

Sakai is an online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.

Sakai is a free and open source product that is built and maintained by the Sakai community. Sakai's development model is called "Community Source" because many of the developers creating Sakai are drawn from the "community" of organizations that have adopted and are using Sakai.

The Sakai Foundation is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to coordinating activities around Sakai and the Sakai community to insure Sakai's long-term viability.

The Sakai Foundation has a number of staff focused on coordinating activities, including a full-time Executive Director who manages the daily operation of the foundation. Sakai staff provides coordination across a number of activities including: project management, quality assurance, release management and conference planning.

The Sakai Foundation is supported by voluntary partner contributions. The Sakai Partners elect the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors, which provide the strategic leadership for the Sakai Foundation.

SI 514:
Introduction to the Semantic Web (Winter 2005)

This is an introduction to the ideas and technologies underlying the proposals and projects grouped under the rubric of the "Semantic Web." The course will take as a starting point the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) vision, where "The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." (Tim Berners-Lee), and will investigate the series of technologies in use and under development to achieve this vision, as well as sample applications of these technologies.

The course will be organized with an introductory overview of the semantic web, then briefly dive down into the first round of detail with XML, XML Schema and related XML tools to gain an understanding of the practice and power of markup languages and their foundational position in the semantic web. We then rise again to the overview level with an introduction to the principles of semantic description and the promise of support for ontologies (formalizations of conceptual domains) embodied in the Resource Description Framework-Schema (RDF/S) effort. Then after diving down into semantic markup using RDF/S, we will rise again to develop a more complete notion of ontologies, their construction and use. We then submerge once more to investigate the logical foundations of the semantic web, focusing on those supporting reasoning on ontologies. We will then emerge to gain an understanding of how these levels might all interact by looking at examples of semantic web applications.

At various times in the course domain experts will be brought in, in person and by VTC, to show us their work and to give us updates in their areas, allowing us to sharpen our knowledge in questions to them. Throughout the course notice will be taken of the groups and communities that are involved in the set of efforts comprising the semantic web, and in the history of the ideas that are contributing to it. This will include presentations by and discussions with people from the W3C, the AI community, and those developing the new Journal of Web Semantics.

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