Identity matters: Constructing social identities through ontology-based metadata

Abstract

Students' understanding of history is often shaped by the social identity they bring to the classroom. Presenting history from the perspective of social identity can be an effective way to connect students to the past. Digital libraries are filled with primary sources that could be used to support this type of learning activity. Traditional descriptive metadata assigned to digital objects often fails to capture specific social identity aspects of the content as well as the relationships between objects that are relevant in history teaching and learning. This paper describes the potential of ontologydriven metadata that represent social, familial, spatial, and temporal relationships between learning objects to help students and faculty construct historical meaning.