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Community & Business Groups

Open Linked Education Community Group

As a burgeoning and emerging area, open linked data for education is currently experiencing momentum across several initiatives and organisations including Open Education, LinkedUp, LinkedUniversities or LinkedEducation., and the Open Knowledge Foundation, to name just a few.

We believe that we are now at a time when these efforts should converge, with this group representing a focus point for the community to collect, capture and adopt the practices that are going to be the foundation of the web of educational data. We therefore set the following set of goals for this group:

1. To collect from existing initiatives the practices currently used to share education-related data on the web. This includes the vocabularies that are employed as well as the ways in which common aspects of the data are being modelled with these vocabularies (e.g.course catalogues, resources, university facilities, research results). Further statistical analysis can provide sound guidance on vocabulary usage within the educational Web of data.

2. To identify common, best practices amongst those and document them (including concrete examples).

3. To facilitate the adoption of these common best practices, through direct interaction with community stakeholders, as well as through showing the benefits of the reuse of data modelling practices in application developments.

While this has some similarities with the idea of “creating an ontology of education”, it is not what we are aiming to achieve. Education is very broad, and our goal is therefore rather to provide common “patterns” that use existing vocabularies for the representation of common education-related data. We do expect this to create resources of interest whenever our efforts will contribute to filling a gap, and to refer to other of such resources (such as LRMI for learning resources) in other cases.

This group will not publish specifications.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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:
  1. UK Dept. of Education
  2. Pearson Higher Education subject taxonomies
  3. Open Univeristy
  4. 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