myVisitPlanner & DEiXTo

We are very happy to announce that DEiXTo is going to power myVisitPlanner, an exciting project funded by the Greek Ministry of Education and Lifelong Learning, under the national action "COOPERATION 2011". myVisitPlanner is coordinated by the University of Macedonia and it is aiming at creating a personalized system for cultural itineraries planning. The consortium participants include Athena - Research and Innovation Center, GNOMON Informatics SA, the Ethnological Museum of Thrace and the West Macedonia Development Company (ANKO) SA. 

DEiXTo-based wrappers are going to be deployed in order to automatically retrieve regional cultural itineraries and points of interest from various, heterogenous target websites. For a pre-defined set of webpages, DEiXTo scrapers will run periodically and monitor them for new content and coming cultural events. However, besides the traditional DOM-based tree patterns, new “smart” and innovative techniques, such as text mining and NLP algorithms, will be used so as to also contend with sites of unknown structure and layout.

myVisitPlanner officially started a few months ago and its duration is 36 months. We are really glad that we are participating in this challenging and exciting project and we hope that DEiXTo will help myVisitPlanner towards implementing its ambitious goals.

TEL-MAP & DEiXTo

DEiXTo was recently used successfully in the context of the TEL-MAP FP7 project in order to scrape the metadata of several European Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) projects from the CORDIS website as well as from the European Commission website.

TEL-MAP is a Coordination and Support Action funded by the European Commission under the Technology-Enhanced Learning programme. It is coordinated by the Brunel University of London and it focuses on exploratory / roadmapping activities for fundamentally new forms of learning to support the adoption of those new forms, via awareness building and knowledge management on the results of EU RTD projects in TEL and socio-economic evaluations in education.

Currently, the TEL-MAP team is building a new portal called "Learning Frontiers". This portal aspires to become a widely recognized, single-point-of-access source of information for all European TEL. Among others, it offers a Projects space that contains a lot of detailed information about numerous TEL EU-funded projects and their participants (essentially the data scraped from the target web pages). It is really worth noting that through using the geo-location info of each participant / organization, Learning Frontiers provides an interactive map of TEL in Europe!

We are really happy that we have helped the Learning Frontiers portal a little towards the implementation of its ambitious vision to increase EU-wide and global dissemination, adoption and impact of EU TEL. We wish them best success!