AcadeMix Juice- A Hybrid Web 2.0/Semantic Web Platform for Exchange of Academic Knowledge

In this paper, we introduce an academic support system with a participative architecture, which attempts to overcome the cultural hierarchical barriers that prevent communication, collaboration and exchange of academic materials in Japanese institutions of higher learning among undergraduates, graduates and faculty. This system, which we dubbed AcadeMix Juice, promotes participative interactions among its users through a set of functional characteristics that include: 1) social publication, 2) self-organizing interest groups, 3) resource-centered communication, 4) inter-field collaborative summarization, 5) personal academic space, and 6) semantic annotation for personal academic assistants. AcadeMix Juice also promotes interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration among its users through inter-field collaborative summarization. All materials in AcadeMix Juice are annotated and made available to members, visitors or semantic Web agents through an academic ontology, which is based on a extended learning object meta-data (LOM) ontology. This ontology supports extensional semantic evolution through integration with folksonomies and personal bookmarks