Alasdair J G Gray

Connecting the dots in the World's data

A short project on linking course data from Sharing and learning

During the summer my colleague Phil Barker (author of the Sharing and Learning blog) and I hosted a summer intern, Anna Grant.

Anna’s project was to investigate the feasibility of publishing the data about our courses as Linked Data. Phil subsequently wrote up a blog post about the work which I have been meaning to share for a long time, so here it is; long overdue.

Below I have picked out some quotes from Phil’s original blog post that describe the work that Anna did.

The objectives for Anna’s work were ambitious: survey existing HE [Higher Education] open data and ontologies in use; design an ontology that we can use; develop an interface we can use to create and publish our course data. Anna made great progress on all three fronts.

The ontologies reviewed were: AIISO, Teach, CourseWare, XCRI, MLO, ECIM and CEDS. A live working draft of the summary / review for these is available for comment as a Google Doc.

The final draft [of the extended MLO Ontology] is shown below. Key:  Green= MLO, Purple=MLO extension, Blue=ECIM / previous alteration to MLO Yellow= generic ontologies such as Dublin core and SKOS.

Extension for the MLO ontology

MLO Extension to capture taught courses and their relationships to degree programmes.

Anna has finished her work here now and returns to Edinburgh Napier University to finish her Master’s project. Alasdair and I think she has done a really impressive job, not least considering she had no previous experience with RDF and semantic technologies. We’ve also found her a pleasure to work with and would like to thank her for her efforts on this project.

Source: A short project on linking course data | Sharing and learning

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    I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. My research focuses on linking datasets. Read more

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