Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices (WWW’2014)

Delivering Linked Data Training to Data Science Practitioners

Marin Dimitrov (CTO)

Contents

• Ontotext’s experience with Linked Data trainings

• Lessons learned

• The EUCLID social media monitoring platform

#2 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

About Ontotext

• Provides products & solutions for semantic metadata management

– Multi-lingual text analytics

– Semantic search

– Linked Data management

• Major clients and industries

– Media & Publishing

– Health Care & Life Sciences

– Cultural Heritage

– Government

– Recruitment

#3 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices

WWW’2014

Apr 2014

The Need for Linked Data Training

• We realised that “educating the market” was a required prerequisite for selling the technology

– 2009: started with product specific training modules

– 2011: training also covers general Linked Data / Semantic Web topics

• Current training curriculum

– Product specific training

– Introduction to Semantic Web

– RDF/S, OWL, ontologies, inference

– SPARQL & RDF databases

– Linked Data & applications

#4 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

Linked Data Training for Data Science Practitioners

• Big organisations / enterprises

– BBC

– British Museum

– UK parliament

– One of the world’s leading financial news organisations

– One of the leading monthly magazines focussed on business & finance

– A global academic publishing company

– One of the biggest & most visited museums in the US

#5 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

Linked Data Training for Data Science Practitioners

• Conferences & events

– NYC, San Francisco, London, Stavanger

• On-premise & online training

#6 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

Lessons Learned

• #1 Be prepared for a mixed audience

– Often a mix between managers, developers & DBAs

– A mix between groups with different prior expertise

– Not easy to tailor the message to the audience needs

• #2 Speak the language of the audience

– Comparison with relational databases / SQL

– Linked Data applications & APIs for developers

– Success stories for managers

#7 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

Lessons Learned

• #3 Strike the right balance between too much & too little theory

– Proper theoretical foundations are important

– … but difficult to plan in advance

– Adjust the training content on the fly

• #4 Success stories & reference architectures are important

– Focus on how and why Linked Data is used in various domains, not only on what it is

– Understanding of the business domain is important

– Organisations want to replicate BBC’s initial with Linked Data applied in production

#8 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

Lessons Learned

• #5 Engage the customer pre- and post-training

– Pre-training: Helps to understand better the audience of the training

– Pre-training: customers can prepare better - background reading, questions, etc.

– Post-training: clarifications, Q&A sessions, further reading

• #6 Record the trainings / webinars

• #7 Bottom-up approach is needed sometimes

– Q&A sessions / open discussion, instead of pre-planned course

– More of a consulting session than a standard training

#9 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

EUCLID SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING PLATFORM

#10 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

EUCLID Social Media Monitoring Platform

• Goals

– Identify “hot topics” related to Linked Data & Semantic Web

– Provide topics for extending & refining the existing EUCLID Linked Data curriculum

• Approach

– Monitor Twitter, selected W3C mail lists, LinkedIn discussion groups, SlideShare uploads

– Integrate & RDF-ize the data coming from various channels

– Automatically extract topics & named entities (text analytics)

– Visual analytics on top of the integrated data

#11 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices

WWW’2014

Apr 2014

EUCLID Social Media Monitoring Platform

• Knowledge base

– FreeBase + GeoNames

– Semantic Web conferences metadata

– Dublin Core, FOAF, SCIOC, SKOS topics

– Manually refined set of Top200 influencers in the Linked Data / Semantic Web community

• Text mining, entity resolution & interlinking

• Data visualisation

#12 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

EUCLID Social Media Monitoring Platform

#13 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

EUCLID Social Media Monitoring Platform

#14 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014

THANK YOU!

#15 Online Learning and Linked Data – Lessons Learned and Best Practices WWW’2014

Apr 2014