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Introduction to the Open Linked Education Data 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.
- 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.
- To identify common, best practices amongst those and document them (including concrete examples and datasets).
- 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.
Participation
A W3C Community Group is an open forum, without fees, where Web developers and other stakeholders develop specifications, hold discussions, develop test suites, and connect with W3C's international community of Web experts.
The Open Linked Education Data Community Group is open to all interested parties regardless of W3C membership. To join the group, please use the groups page.
Resources
- Vocabularies - A set of vocabularies that have been used to represent educational resources and other notions associated with education
- Modelling cases - A set of examples of the modelling of particular data aspects in education
- Patterns - Suggested patterns, as best practices for modelling particular data aspects in education
- Datasets - Datasets deploying any of the above (see also links below)