Linking Design Principles to Context and Evidence: A Semantic Web Approach

In this chapter, we seek to answer the question how information about learning design principles and their use can be digitally represented, stored, indexed, and be made accessible for local (Intranet) or open (Internet) use. This is a knowledge representation and management issue, not one of how design principles should be captured in natural language (i.e., as text). From an analysis of the literature, we conclude that design principles need to be represented digitally as linked data, specifically as a knowledge graph. This is because the value of design principles only occurs to designers if the principles are contextualized: in problems, experience, theory, and social structures. Specifically, we build on an extended version of conjecture maps as a sufficiently comprehensive structure that then informs a more formal conceptualisation of a knowledge graph and by the same token, of a database design. Since the formalisation is based on Semantic Web approaches, this constitutes a step towards a digital infrastructure for sharing design principles on the Internet. We illustrate the approach with an example from a pedagogical design embedding a digital environment for computational literacy in L1 education.