Building a Linked Data Graph for Education

Thursday, September 20, 2012

11:00 AM - 11:30 AM

Level:

Practical Experience

Just as a social and professional graph have emerged through Facebook and LinkedIn, so too is an education graph emerging describing connections between students, teachers and the learning resources they use. The Talis Aspire application allows university lecturers to create lists of learning resources for a particular course, which are then expressed according to the Linked Data paradigm. With the application now in use at one quarter of UK universities, the resulting data provides a rich insight into patterns of resource usage across the education sector. This talk will detail the mechanisms used to unify the various institutional graphs, exploiting the flexibility of the RDF data model and the Linked Data principles, before describing how this unified education graph is being used to provide value back to customers, in the form of analytics and recommendations.

Key points:

• Talis Aspire is based on Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles.
• It is widely deployed across the UK Higher Education sector and used daily by large numbers of staff and students.
• The aggregate view of the resulting data provides unique, cross-sector insights.
• The techniques used to assemble this graph mirror those used to interlink the Web of Data as a whole.

Dr. Tom Heath is Senior Research Scientist at Talis Education Ltd, a Birmingham, UK-based software company and global leader in the research, development and commercial exploitation of Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies in the education sector. Tom has been active in the Linked Data community since its inception in early 2007, co-founding the highly successful workshop series "Linked Data on the Web" and co-authoring the seminal works "Linked Data - The Story So Far" (with Chris Bizer and Tim Berners-Lee) and "Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space" (with Chris Bizer). In 2007 Tom won first prize in the International Semantic Web Challenge, was awarded STI International PhD of the Year 2008/9, and named one of "AI's 10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2011. He has a PhD in Computer Science from The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute.