Hello Open Linked Ed Data Community!
Thank you for participating with the Open Linked Education Data Community Group. In going over some of our goals with esteemed colleagues at W3C, I’m told that our ambitions are unprecedented for Open Linked Data. Curating Open Data and releasing shareable vocabularies that can be used for tagging learning resources hasn’t been done before I’m told, though it seems so obvious that I find it hard to believe. This shall be exciting then.
A quick update:
- Chris Sizemore, BBC Online Learning has agreed to be my Co-Chair.
- Pearson has agreed to host the first triple store in a secured database. I will forward the URL as soon as it is established. We won’t include the name of Pearson on the URL, not to worry
- Chris and I would like to start out by attempting to converge and harmonize a few vocabulary sets. We suggested merging subject vocabularies from the following:
- UK Dept. of Education
- Pearson Higher Education subject taxonomies
- Open Univeristy
- BBC Online Learning Curriculum-based subject terms
The challenges here will be significant: persistant IDs, retaining links to DBpedia or Freebase, identifying differing editorial interpretations, disambiguation, etc.
We will share our progress and will come to the group to help us with each step along the way.
Thank you again. I look forward to working with you all.
Madi Solomon
Pearson
Hello,
What an exciting message!
I am very interested in helping out in whatever way I can, and am so pleased that the Education, Skills and Children’s Services Thesaurus, managed from within the Department for Education, is being included in this work.
Best wishes
Helen Challinor
* I am using the BBC Curriculum Ontology and I am a secondary school teacher, working in the English state system. The educational terms that I and my colleagues are familiar with are defined in a different context in the Ontology eg:Topic, TopicOfStudy and ProgrammeOfStudy
* Business domain concepts are seeping into the Ontology eg:’asset’
Property: examBoard
Label exam board
Status stable
Range ExamBoard
Specifies an asset is useful for a specific exam board.
*I think it may be too broad a task to converge the vocabularies from the UK Dept. of Education to the University level. This is primary to graduate/postgraduate levels.
*The intended user of the Ontology has to be considered in the definition of terms, teachers in the primary/secondary sector and/or lecturers in the college/university sector.
Thanks Saleha, your comments are well taken. After looking at the UK Dept. of Education, it became apparent that their vocabularies were not a generalised subject-based.
Business Domains, as a vocabulary for the BBC Ontology is out of scope for this project.
The intended user of the subject open linked data should be broad, I believe. Some subjects may have deep taxonomies (e.g. Science) but otherwise, we’ll try to keep them generally curated (e.g. Science Fiction terms filtered out).
Has there been any progress on converging and harmonizing the vocabulary sets? As a teacher in the 11-18 sector, I am very interested in how relevant and useable the vocabulary will be.
I am using the BBC ontology at present, for my work. I would also be interested in contributing my experience, from within the Secondary education sector.