#361 Presentation

Monday 16 April 14:30 - 15:00 Fitzpatrick Theatre

Linked OpenCourseWare Data: a demonstration of the potential for exploitation of data

Edmundo Tovar, OCW UPM, Spain

Conference Theme: Innovation

Summary: Presentation of OCW Universia data query scenarios linked through semantic filters

Abstract: It is well-known that OpenCourseWare (OCW) is one of the most successful emerging initiatives in the global promotion of free and unrestricted access to knowledge from academia. In April 2001, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) launched OCW-MIT. Concretely, it released under open licenses those teaching materials that teachers use in teaching. Many prestigious international universities have joined to this movement, and currently the OpenCourseWareConsortium has became in a worldwide community of hundreds of universities and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWareand its impact on global education. The consortium serves as a resource for starting and sustaining OCW projects, as a coordinating body for the movement on a global scale, and as a forum for exchange of ideas and future planning. Many Spanish and Latinoamerican universities promote and disseminate the OCW concept through the regional OCW UNIVERSIA Consortium.
In addition, the repositories, organization and internal structure of an OCW are diverse according to the vision of each university. For that reason, there is no standardized way to implement initiatives OCW. There are only minimum recommendations and agreements on the characteristics of the repositories and on the structure of an OCW basically. Nevertheless, these agreements have offered enough momentum to drive rapid adoption of the OCW initiatives, although there have been difficulties for implementation of tools to process data automatically OCW. Thus, one of the greatest challenges of OCW initiatives, in particular OCW Universia, is to study the heterogeneity of existing OCW repositories. This part deals with interoperability problems among and within institutions. Consequently, the lack of interoperability could show some disadvantages to the discovery, reuse and remix of OCWs. With a wide offer of OCW material, users could find difficulties when they select among educational materials based on the same theme or concept”.
In this paper, authors show how the principles of Linked Data have the ability to enhance search and discovery OCWs created and shared by the universities and propose a novel  infrastructure  that allows: (i) Integration and access to content from different repositories OCW implemented in different RDF vocabularies accessed via HTTP and (ii) Development of a query method to access these data.
Experimentation, that has been carried out under the umbrella of OCW Universia consortium. OCW Universia has selected some OCW attributes to search and discover educational resources, i.e., it has generated pages that work with the search service based on Google search engine mainly. Limitations of this service are the same as found in Web browsers Documents. Some of them are: wide range of results like hundreds or even thousands of OCWs, search based on similarity of words and not meanings, ambiguity problems with the returned results, a small number of possibilities to enable automated discovery of concepts associated with an OCW and other data which are stored in open-sets, among others.
The results presented reveal that Linked Data would offer a solution to filter and select semantically those open educational contents, and demonstrates how this solution allow to users obtain more information from an OCW, i.e., automatically linked to related information that is in the Linked Open Data Cloud.