A New Approach to Delivering Astronomy Content Online
Abstract
We have created an online application that clusters the entire Wikipedia and provides a new and useful search engine and interface for the widely used internet knowledge medium. We used an existing open source search engine, and modified it with our own algorithms to give the best possible results from a search query. Astronomy served as the primary test subject in which we analyzed our clustering algorithms. We found that once our algorithms were working well for clustering astronomy articles, similarly decent results were obtained in other academic test subjects. This tool will be implemented and tested for effectiveness in introductory astronomy courses at The University of Arizona. In addition to Wikipedia, we are using our tool to cluster an online astronomy textbook and astronomy lecture video content. Our clustering and search algorithms have potential to be applied to many other subjects and online content. We believe that our tools will be beneficial to students and help them easily navigate and see correlation between subjects within the compendium of knowledge online.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0715517, a CCLI Phase III Grant for the Collaboration of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #217
- Pub Date:
- January 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AAS...21724710H