Stuart Brown

The Open University Linked Data – data.open.ac.uk

The article reports on the evolution of data.open.ac.uk, the Linked Open Data platform of the Open University, from a research experiment to a data hub for the open content of the University. Entirely based on Semantic Web technologies (RDF and the Linked Data principles), data.open.ac.uk is used to curate, publish and access data about academic degree qualifications, courses, scholarly publications and open educational resources of the University. It exposes a SPARQL endpoint and several other services to support developers, including queries stored server-side and entity lookup using known identifers such as course codes and YouTube video IDs. The platform is now a key information service at the Open University, with several core systems and websites exploiting linked data through data.open.ac.uk. Through these applications, data.open.ac.uk is now fulfilling a key role in the overall data infrastructure of the university, and in establishing connections with other educational institutions and information providers.

Leibniz and the classical tradition

Leibniz was inducted into the Classical tradition at a very early age and he never lost his enthusiasm for ancient philosophy. In the late 1660s he engaged in a project to reconcile Aristotle with Modern Philosophy. During his stay in Paris, however, he alled himself with the French defenders of ancient philosophy against the Cartesians and made some study of the texts of Plato. He was reluctant to publish his own metaphysical system, fearing the charge of “innovation” and, when he eventually published a version of it, he made much of links with Classical authors. In his later philosophy Leibniz presented himself within the tradition of eclecticism but, it is suggested, his thought is closest to that of Plato and his early followers.

The Regularization of Providence in Post-Cartesian Philosophy

In one strand of Christian thinking providence is conceived as essentially irregular. According to this tradition, God’s grace and will cannot be governed by rules. It would be unworthy of God’s inscrutable majesty to represent his will as anything other than arbitrary. For it would not be God’s will if it were determined by or dependent upon anything outside itself. Humans are tempted to imagine that there are eternal truths and therefore standards of goodness independent even of God’s will. But God could, were he so to choose, vary any of the eternal verities. They continue to hold only insofar as it is God’s will that they should. God did not make this world because it conformed to some eternal and autonomous standards of goodness. On the contrary, according to this view, commonly referred to as ‘theological voluntarism’1 the world is good simply because it was God’s will that it should exist.

Leibniz’s Break with Cartesian ‘Rationalism’

In a short paper for the Acta eruditorum in 1694 Leibniz gave the first public intimation of his new metaphysics. In it he lamented the fact that a first philosophy remained to be sought. Descartes, for all that he had contributed “some admirable things” (Loemker, 1969, p. 432; Gerhardt, 1875–1890, iv, p. 468), had “failed to distinguish the certain from the uncertain” and in consequence missed the mark. Metaphysicians were in need of a new way of proceeding (proponendi ratio) which would, in one of Leibniz’s favourite metaphors, provide them with an Ariadne’s thread by which to escape from the maze of problems in which they were lost. What was needed was a procedure that would serve as a check on the truth of metaphysical propositions — a way of avoiding the kind of error into which Descartes and his followers had fallen.