Linked Data to Improve the OER Experience

Linked Data to enhance users experience with Open Education

ResourcesEdmundo Tovar (UPM [email protected] ) - Nelson Piedra (UTPL, [email protected])Jorge López, Janneth Chicaiza, Oscar Martinez

OCWC Global 2011: Celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWareCambridge, Massachusetts, USAMay 4, 2011 – May 6, 2011

this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ec/

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ec/

some motivations

Status of the Current WebWeb Content:Diversity of Platforms and systems (CMS, APIs); Web silos of content.A lot of Data contained in millions of web-documents (embedded within Content Management Systems).

Discoverability and reusability:Not possible to reuse data outside the CMS/WebAppsNot data available as unified machine readable formatDiversity of APIs

Silos of data/relations/informations: Walled Social Networks Cartoon

The World Wide Web is defined as the universal, all-encompassing space containing all Internet - and other - resources referenced by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs, sometimes commonly called "URLs").

The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. [Tim Berners-Lee]

One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. [TBL]

Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form. [TBL]

Web of Documentwhere links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTMLfrom humans for humans

and machines? no really welcome....

Web of DataDiscovery, Access, and Usages of Resources

in the Web

Web of Data,Link DATA rather than DOCUMENTS Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods.

Linked Data as a best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF. Links between arbitrary things described by RDF

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

Semantic WEBThe Semantic Web isn't just about putting

data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you

have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

Linked-Data Principles

• Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData

1.Use URIs to name things on the Web (for naming everything real or abstract you could think of)

2.Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. 3.When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the

standards (RDF*, SPARQL) 4.Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData

Linked Data Key Concepts• resource -- an thing of interest (OCW, syllabus, test, lecture,

presentation, document, OER, ... )• URI -- global identifier for a resource. The URIs identify any kind of

object or concept. • representation -- data corresponding to the state of a resource • information resource -- a “document” containing information • non-information resource -- anything else • associated description -- representation describing a Semantic Web

resource

The Resource Description Framework (RDF)• RDF: The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.

• Resource - everything with a URI• Description - properties of these resources• Framework - a system to build on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specification

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_model

The RDF Data Model

RDF Triples Resource Description Framework"

subject<uri>

traits or aspects of the resource

predicatetyped-link


object<uri> or “literal”


Linked Data core stack

HTTP URI

RDF

SPARQL

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616


http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

Linked Data Core Stack, Specifications• RFC 2616 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:

Defines HTTP, a generic and stateless application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.

• RFC 3986 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax: Defines a generic URI syntax and a process for resolving URI references that might be in relative form, along with guidelines and security considerations for the use of URIs on the Internet.

• RDF Concepts and Abstract Syntax: Defines the RDF graph data model and key concepts.

• SPARQL Query Language for RDF: Defines defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF.



http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-concepts/

http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

The Linking Open Data cloud diagram, evolution

“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

Next images sequence shows datasets that have been published in Linked Data format, by contributors to the Linking Open Data community project and other individuals and organisations. It is based on metadata collected and curated by contributors to the CKAN directory. Last updated: 2010-09-22.

http://lod-cloud.net/

http://linkeddata.org/

http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData

http://ckan.net/

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2010-09-22_colored.html

2007100825

datasets

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2007-10-08.png

“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/” This work is available under a CC-BY-SA license.




2007110728

datasets






2007111028

datasets






20080228

32 datasets






Linked Data is Real

TED2009 Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web

20080331

34 datasets






20080919

45 datasets






20090305

89 datasets






20090327

93 datasets






20090714

95 datasets






20100922

203 datasets

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2010-09-22_colored.png





LinkedOCWData Project

GOAL LinkedOCWData Project• Our Goal: One of the main objectives of our team is:

• to connect Linked Data with Open Educational Resources, aiming to improve users’ experience of OERs and OCWs.

• To explore how the principles of Linked Data can be used to help teachers, students and self-learners find open content.

• Motivation: There is an enormous amount of information and digital resources that our OCWs Officess produce in their respective universities. We must find a way to exchange quick and easy access; we must put all information in one place and under the same principles of design.

ABOUT LinkedOCWData Project• About Project: LinkedOCWData project is to make the

OpenCourseWare (OCW) and OpenEducationalResources(OER) datasets easily available as RDF. Additionally, we are providing interlinking with DBpedia, GeoNames and Univerisities Linked Datasets.

• Expected outcome: The result is a rich, open and integrated dataset which we hope to be useful for research and application development. The datasets can be publicly accessed via downloads, Linked Data, and SPARQL-endpoints. We have also launched an experimental “Live-SPARQL-endpoint” that is synchronized with the minutely updates from OCW/OER initiatives whereas the changes to our store are republished as RDF.

Life Cycle: LinkedOCWData Project

Linked Data requires you to assign URLs to identify things: people, places, events, whatever.

• Consensual vocabulary to assess the advantages of using Linked Data in Open Educational Materials.

• 1. Deciding what content to look for. Faced with a wide range of open content, it is difficult to decide between materials of the same subject. Thus, it will be possible to anticipate some of the interests of OCW users.

• 2. We can help people get more information by using the URL of an open educational resource, and connecting it automatically to related information found in the internet cloud, conveniently and unobtrusively. It consequently adds context to knowledge and open educational materials

A challenging task: LinkedOCWData Project

Example: Linked Data applied to

OpenCourseWareOpencourseware description:

Ontologies and Semantic Web, 2008

The general objective is to provide students with a sound grounding of scientific, methodological and technological fundamentals in Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web areas. This knowledge will be later used to build applications

that can integrate, combine and infer heterogeneous and distributed information.

Guadalupe Aguado; Oscar Corcho; Asunción GómezDepartamento de Inteligencia Artificial.

Facultad de Informática.A four-monthly subject in the following official master programs: Master in Information Technologies

European Master in Logic Computation (ERASMUS Mundus Program)Master in Research in Artificial Intelligence

Ontology Network

Last revision: April 2008.

It is credited 6 ECTS.Presential classes: 2 hours/week.

Total learning time: 32 hours.

http://ocw.upm.es/ciencia-de-la-computacion-e-inteligencia-artificial/ontologies-and-semantic-web

raw data within UPM opencourseware web page

Title

OCW University

Author(s)

year

description

knowledge area

bibliography

ects creditstime

autoself

Department

syllabus

‘Ontologies and Semantic

Web’

author-creator

Asunción Gómez Pérez

has a

whose name is

subject

predicate

object


http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1//creator

Asunción Gómez Pérez

has a

whose name is

subject

predicate

object







RDF graph of OpenCourseWare

• So a lot of work has gone into use and reuse resources integration: we wanted to explore how to automate some of the process. To publish OCW and OER on our websites, we needed to capture the metadata naturally produced in the production process and expose it online. CMS:

• Educommons

• Moodle

• Drupal

• DSpace

integration of OCW Content Management Systems

to finishLinked Data as a best practice for exposing, sharing, connecting, and interoperate from opencourseware resources, pieces of data,

information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

Conclusion• Linked data is essential to actually connect the semantic web. It is

quite easy to do with a little thought, and becomes second nature. Various common sense considerations determine when to make a link and when not to.

• Linked Data, and RDF specifically, it is so much more portable than any other format. This means that teorically any organization/person can easily replicate data, to share and providing access. With Linked Data the OCW Initiatives have the option of federating or sharing data across the web.

• Linked data benefits: linking the pieces of data, information, knowledge on the Web from disparate resources. Machine processable information ready to use by web software-agents. Improved retrieval and discovery services