News Story

First KMi Summit on Linked Data and the OU

John Domingue, Wednesday 27 Jul 2011

Linked Data, the sharing of data on the Web at large scale through the use of URIs, the HTTP protocol and RDF is gaining uptake at an ever increasing rate. As, commonly known, this technology is now supported by a number of large players including the UK Government, the BBC, Google, Yahoo and to some extent Facebook.

In addition to the relative simplicity of the principles and technologies underlying Linked Data a second major reason for its growing popularity is that it is supported by a number of high quality industrial-strength tools. Following, from this we now find ourselves in a situation where a number of KMi related projects are deploying Linked Data here at the OU. This first summit provided an opportunity for these projects to outline what has been achieved thus far and for KMi in general to discuss plans and priorities for future development and deployment.

Specifically, the event covered the following projects:

LUCERO – the project which setup data.open.ac.uk the first Linked Data site in the UK (and probably the world) for a higher education establishment.
RADAR – which supports the analysis and management of OU research data thus aiding with the OU REF submission.
CORE – connecting together disparate scientific repositories enabling them to be searched as a single resource.
Annomation and SugarTube – which enable, respectively, the annotation and semantic search over BBC archives. These tools aim to support OU course teams who wish to find relevant video segments related to a specific OU course topic.
UCIAD – which uses Linked Data to support the analysis of user activity across OU systems.

Overall the event was very successful, showcasing a number of innovations and also how useful Linked Data already is to the OU business. One of the main action points of the meeting is that KMi will support the creation of a new OU-wide Linked Data portal which will: act as a central repository for all relevant resources; document relevant activities; and act as an OU Linked Data showcase.