Linking Universities - A broader look at the application of linked data and

semantic web technologies in an academic environment

Mathieu d’Aquin Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK

@mdaquin

A University…

A University…

A university is an institution of higher education and research which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects and provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education. The word "university" is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means “community of teachers and scholars.”

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University

The Open University

•  The largest university in the UK: 250K students per year, 8000 associate lecturers, a big campus in Milton Keynes

•  Created in 1969 •  Almost entirely open and

distance learning •  13 regional centers, more

national centers, courses available in a large number of countries

Public information at the Open University

ORO  

Archive  of    Course    Material  

Library’s  Catalogue  Of  Digital    Content  

OpenLearn  Content  

A/V  Material  Podcasts  iTunesU  

Data  from    Research    Outputs  

Linked Data Open University

Website

Open University VLE

Mathieu’s Homepage

Mathieu’s List of

Publications Mathieu’s

Twitter

The Web"

M366 Course page

Person: Mathieu

Publication: Pub1

Organisation: The Open University

Course: M366

Country: Belgium

Book: Mechatronics

author

workFor

availableIn

offers

setBook

The Web of Linked Data"

Applying linked data to the Open University

ORO  

Archive  of    Course    Material  

Library’s  Catalogue  Of  Digital    Content  

OpenLearn  Content  

A/V  Material  Podcasts  iTunesU  

Data  from    Research    Outputs  

BBC  

DBPedia  

DBLP  

RAE  

geonames  

data.gov.uk  

data.open.ac.uk The first linked data platform providing open information from a across a whole university

Linked Data at the Open University Course information:

580 modules/ description of the course, information about the levels and number of credits associated with it, topics, and conditions of enrolment.

Research publications:

16,000 academic articles / information about authors, dates, abstract and venue of the publication.

Podcasts:

2220 video podcasts and 1500 audio podcats / short description, topics, link to a representative image and to a transscript if available, information about the course the podcast might relate to and license information regarding the content of the podcast.

Open Educational Resources: 640 OpenLearn Units / short description, topics, tags used to annotate the resource, its language, the course it might relate to, and the license that applies to the content.

Youtube videos: 900 videos / short description of the video, tags that were used to annotate the video, collection it might be part of and link to the related course if relevant.

University buildings:

100 buildings / address, a picture of the building and the sub-divisions of the building into floors and spaces.

Library catalogue:

12,000 books/ topics, authors, publisher and ISBN, as well as the course related. Others…

Applications

Resource "Discovery"

Research"Exploration

Social"

Example Application: Study at the OU

That’s where linked data is

Example application: Media Relation Reports

Academics in “Arts and Humanities” most often involved with the media (in

number of news items)"

Topics most commonly mentioned by news outlets owned by the BBC (in

number of news items)"

From news clipping data

From dataset about our researchers From dbpedia.org

Research Application: ���Research communities

Beyond the Single University

The Open University"

University of Bristol"

University of Southampton"

mEducator"

University of Muenster, DE"OrganicEduNet"

Data.gov.uk education"

Orgs., Buidings, Locations"

Learning resources"

Research ouputs"

See http://linkeduniversities.org

LinkedUp The LinkedUp support action (http://linkedup-project.eu): tackling the challenge of large scale Web Data integration for concrete educational scenarios

State of the Linked Education Cloud

•  Currently building a catalogue of educational datasets (the LinkedUp data pool). Collected 165 from 27 sources so far. There is immensely more!

•  About 600 classes, less than 100 used by more than 1 dataset

•  Almost 1000 properties, less than 180 used by more than 1 dataset

Number of datasets containing instances of a given class���

Number of datasets using a given property

Challenge: Discovery of open educational resources���Example: DiscOU - http://discou.info

data.open.ac.uk

Semantic Indexing

Semantic Index

Named Entity Recognition

Podcasts, OpenLearn Units and Articles

Semantic Entities (Dbpedia)

Indexes

BBC Programme or iPlayer page

Synopsis

Similarity-Based Search

Indexes

Interface

Resource descriptions

Resources URIs + common topics

Challenge: Supporting Research ���Example: Reading Experience Database Project

Experience  

Person  

Document  

Event  LocaHon  

City   Country  date:  Date  

subClassOf  subClassOf  

locatedIn  

readerInvolved  

textInvolved   givesBackgroundTo  

Htle:  String  descripHon:  String  published:  Date  

creator/editor  

providesExcerptFor  

occupaHon  

religion  

originCountry  

gender  

LinkedEvent  Ontology  

CITO  CitaHon  Ontology  

Dublin  Core  

FOAF  

DBPedia  

More research support… Building new directions for investigation, e.g. reading during the first world war

Linked Data as data/knowledge capture medium from the start: new projects with Linked Data as their backbone (Listening Experience Database, Damned in Hell…)

Challenge: Need for new methodologies���Example: Enriching data-mining results for interpretation

Conclusion Universities / Education / Research have for objective to create and share knowledge Linked Data provides a backbone to achieve that, while removing the technological barrier between researchers/teachers/students and the data Semantic Web and Knowledge technologies have the potential to support new methodologies for learning design and for research, whatever the domain

Thank you!

More info and contacts: @mdaquin

m.daquin@open.ac.uk http://mdaquin.net

http://linkeduniversities.org http://linkedup-project.org