Interlinking educational data to web of data

Abstract

With the proliferation of educational data on the Web, publishing and interlinking eLearning resources have become an important issue nowadays. Educational resources are exposed under heterogeneous Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in different times and formats. Some resources are implicitly related to each other or to the interest, cultural and technical environment of learners. Linking educational resources to useful knowledge on the Web improves resource seeking. This becomes crucial for moving from current isolated eLearning repositories towards an open discovery space, including distributed resources irrespective of their geographic and system boundaries. Linking resources is also useful for enriching educational content, as it provides a richer context and other related information to both educators and learners. On the other hand, the emergence of the so-called "Linked Data" brings new opportunities for interconnecting different kinds of resources on the Web of Data. Using the Linked Data approach, data providers can publish structured data and establish typed links between them from various sources. To this aim, many tools, approaches and frameworks have been built to first expose the data as Linked Data formats and to second discover the similarities between entities in the datasets. The research carried out for this PhD thesis assesses the possibilities of applying the Linked Open Data paradigm to the enrichment of educational resources. Generally speaking, we discuss the interlinking educational objects and eLearning resources on the Web of Data focusing on existing schemas and tools. The main goals of this thesis are thus to cover the following aspects: -- Exposing the educational (meta)data schemas and particularly IEEE LOM as Linked Data -- Evaluating currently available interlinking tools in the Linked Data context -- Analyzing datasets in the Linked Open Data cloud, to discover appropriate datasets for interlinking -- Discussing the benefits of interlinking educational (meta)data in practice.