Production and consumption of university Linked Data

Abstract

Linked Data increases the value of an organisation's data over the web by introducing explicit and machine processable links at the data level. We have adopted this new stream of data representation to produce and expose existing data within The Open University (OU) as Linked Data. We present in this paper our approach for producing the data, based on well-defined workflows at the organisation as well as the technical levels. We also discuss the data already available to consume, and show the potential improvements that Linked Data brings by presenting three applications: (1) the OU Expert Search system for finding experts at the OU based on a specified topic of interest, (2) the Social Study application to identify potential courses for students based on their Facebook profile information, and (3) the Linked OpenLearn application that helps students identify related media and courses to OpenLearn units at the OU. Before concluding the paper, we show the potential benefits and an approach towards interlinking data beyond The Open University with other universities, using a common categorisation scheme. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.