I am involved in two major research projects here at Totuba, and in the following posts, I will present these in more detail. The first one is the Totuba Toolkit, a set of tools that make life easier for learners and researchers. The toolkit consists of the following components:

• The Totuba Research Assistant helps students to capture, categorize and reference useful information off the web.
• The Totuba Knowledge Repository stores information saved from Totuba Research Assistant and acts as the student’s long-term personal information repository.
• The Totuba Workspace provides support while writing research and term papers. It extracts the main topics from your document and suggests further reading about these topics. The Workspace also shows topics that are related to your topics and how. This enables you to quickly find additional information you need.

The Totuba Toolkit is in an open, rolling development mode. If you want to give it a try, please send an email to toolkit@totuba.com.

Our main goal was to find out what can be done with today’s technology. For instance, the Totuba Workspace is based on Semantic Web technology. We won’t go into detail right now, but we are using DBPedia, a service that represents Wikipedia in Semantic Web format, that is in a way this encyclopedia can be used by machines automatically.

The second research project we are working on is also related to the Semantic Web. Here at Totuba, we have a public database containing thousands of courses (e.g., Mandarin courses, MBA, etc.). We collected this data from various sites and manually curated it so that you as a learner can easily find and compare the course best suited for you. This is valuable data. We believe that this data will be most beneficial to us and you if we share it. One principle underlying the big shift from the “Web 1.0″ to Web 2.0 was that Web sites became more open. Twitter is the best example for that. Twitter makes its functionality (posting updates, reading updates) and data (the updates) available to other sites and tools via Web interfaces. This allowed a garden of services and tools to grow around Twitter. Desktop applications, search engines, visualization sites, even art projects.
The idea behind the Semantic Web is to take this openness one step further. Today, Twitter has its own interface, Flickr has its own, etc, etc. The Semantic Web specifies a set of standards how to make your data available so that other services can access it.
That is what we want to explore at Totuba. What will happen once we make valuable data like ours available. What kind of data exchange opportunities and mash-up ideas will our efforts generate? More about this in a later post.