Hannes Ebner

Interlinking educational resources and the web of data: A survey of challenges and approaches

Purpose - Research in the area of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, or interface mechanisms. More recently, semantic technologies were taken into account to improve interoperability. The linked data approach has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing data on the web. To this end, it is obvious that the application of linked data principles offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. This paper aims to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, approaches are surveyed that are aimed towards a vision of linked education, i.e. education which exploits educational web data. It particularly considers the exploitation of the wealth of already existing TEL data on the web by allowing its exposure as linked data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. Findings - So far web-scale integration of educational resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. However, linked data principles increasingly are recognized by the TEL community. The paper provides a structured assessment and classification of existing challenges and approaches, serving as potential guideline for researchers and practitioners in the field. Originality/value - Being one of the first comprehensive surveys on the topic of linked data for education, the paper has the potential to become a widely recognized reference publication in the area.

Architecture of the Organic.Edunet Web Portal

The use of Semantic Web technologies in educational Web portals has been reported to facilitate users search, access, and retrieval of learning resources. To achieve this, a number of different architectural components and services need to be harmonically combined and implemented. This article presents how this issue is dealt with in the context of a large-scale case study. More specifically, it describes the architecture behind the Organic. Edunet Web portal that aims to provide access to a federation of repositories with learning resources on agricultural topics. The various components of the architecture are presented and the supporting technologies are explained. In addition, the article focuses on how Semantic Web technologies are being adopted, specialized, and put in practice in order to facilitate ontology-aided sharing and reusing of learning resources.

Learning Object Annotation for Agricultural Learning Repositories

This paper introduces a Web-based tool that has been developed to facilitate learning object annotation in agricultural learning repositories with IEEE LOM-compliant metadata. More specifically, it presents how an application profile of the IEEE LOM standard has been developed for the description of learning objects on organic agriculture and agroecology. Then, it describes the design and prototype development of the Organic.Edunet repository tool: a Web-based for annotating learning objects on organic agriculture and agroecology, organizing them in using a portfolio-like user interface in a learning repository, and then federating this repository with a network of agricultural learning repositories.

A Semantic Infrastructure to Support a Federation of Agricultural Learning Repositories

This paper outlines how Semantic Web technologies are being adopted, specialized, and put in practice in order to set up a technical infrastructure that will facilitate sharing and reusing of learning resources. The case study is a federation of learning repositories with learning resources on agricultural topics, which is being developed in the context of the Organic.Edunet European initiative.

An information model for managing resources and their metadata

Today information is managed within increasingly complicated Web applications which often rely on similar information models. Finding a reusable and sufficiently generic information model for managing resources and their metadata would greatly simplify development of Web applications. This article presents such an information model, namely the Resource and Metadata Management Model ReM3. The information model builds upon Web architecture and standards, more specifically the Linked Data principles when managing resources together with their metadata. It allows to express relations between metadata and to keep track of provenance and access control. In addition to this information model, the architecture of the reference implementation is described along with a Web application that builds upon it. To show the taken approach in practice, several real-world examples are presented as showcases. The information model and its reference implementation have been evaluated from several perspectives, such as the suitability for resource annotation, a preliminary scalability analysis and the adoption in a number of projects. This evaluation in various complementary dimensions shows that ReM3 has been successfully applied in practice and can be considered a serious alternative when developing Web applications where resources are managed along with their metadata.