Linked Data at The Open University: From Technical Challenges to

Organizational Innovation

Mathieu d’Aquin (@mdaquin)

Knowledge Media Institute

Stuart Brown (@stuartbrown)

Communication Services

The Open University

What are we doing in the industry track?

Knowledge Media Institute: leading research center on semantic web technologies:

– Ontology engineering, ontology discovery

– Knowledge representation, reasoning, problem solving

– Interoperability, services, ontology matching, data linking

– 80 researchers/research assistants/PhD Students/ Academic-related staff

– 100s of publications

http://kmi.open.ac.uk

And So?

KMi is a department of the Open UniversityThe Open University:

– The largest university in the UK: 250K students per year, 8000 associate lecturers, a big campus in Milton Keynes

– Created in 1969– Almost entirely open and distance

learning– 13 regional center, more national

centers, courses available in a large number of countries

Big organization = crazy information infrastructure

data.open.ac.uk

The first linked data platform providing open information from a across a whole university

Lots a (types) of data

Course information: 580 modules/ description of the course, information about the levels and number of credits associated with it, topics, and conditions of enrolment.

Research publications: 16,000 academic articles / information about authors, dates, abstract and venue of the publication.

Podcasts: 2220 video podcasts and 1500 audio podcats / short description, topics, link to a representative image and to a transscript if available, information about the course the podcast might relate to and license information regarding the content of the podcast.

Open Educational Resources: 640 OpenLearn Units / short description, topics, tags used to annotate the resource, its language, the course it might relate to, and the license that applies to the content.

Youtube videos: 900 videos / short description of the video, tags that were used to annotate the video, collection it might be part of and link to the related course if relevant.

University buildings: 100 buildings / address, a picture of the building and the sub-divisions of the building into floors and spaces.

Library catalogue: 12,000 books/ topics, authors, publisher and ISBN, as well as the course related.

Others…

Planning + Logging

Collect Extract Link Store Expose

OntologiesScheduler

RSS Updater

Triple Store

Delete (1)Add (2)

SPARQLendpoint

Web Server

RSS Extractor

XML Updater

RDF Extractor

RDF Cleaner

Cleaning rules

Each datasets

Lib, courses, loc

ORO, podcast

URL redirection rules

RSS feed

New itemsObsolete items

RDF file (add) RDF file (delete)

RDF file (add) RDF file (delete)

Generic process Dataset specific process

Entity Name

SystemURI creation rules

First Issue: Convincing People

Not the technical bit… that’s easydata.open.ac.uk is now a core infrastructure element of the Open University. But it took a lot of talking…

Initial Meeting with Data Owner

- Identify data- Get sample data- Identify Copyright Issues- Identify possible links- Identify users and usage

Data Modeling sessions

LD Team

Data Owner

LD Team

LD Team

- Find reusable ontologies- Map onto the data- Identify uncovered parts- Define URI Scheme

Data Modeling Validation

LD Team

Data Owner

Development of Extractor

URI Creation Rules

DefinitionDeploymentLD Team

Where most of the work is done

What works

Not changing the way people work:– Pull data from feed exported by

the original system. Not changing them, or introducing any additional difficulty.

– Data taken “as is”, with an effort on understanding its original modeling.

Bring the user along, add value– Data re-modeling as linked data

creates positive side effects on the original data

– Talk about possible links and usages first

– Improve the usability of the data produce by the institution = make the work of people more visible and useful

So, what it is that we can do?

Oh no! We can’t find a killer app!

“Small things” that either were impossible before, or are now trivial to do

Ben, in the corridor:

Time difference in answering this question: x weeks 5 minutesnot really feasible easy

Hey! Your linked data thing, can it tell me what are the podcasts attached to courses that we no longer offer?

Simple works… A lot of “simple” works!

Resource Discovery

ResearchExploration

Social

Example: map of buildings

Interactive map of Open University Buildings in the UK

Built in 1 hour

Connected to Ordnance Survey for location based on post-codes

Allowed us to find out about issues in the data.

Example: Connecting our resources

Show the courses and podcasts that connect to a piece of open educational resources.Trivial with data.open.ac.uk Impossible to do before (!)

Simple things as examples: Inspire

The simple apps above are not demonstrating particularly impressive technical achievements: They are here to show what can be done (easily)

Study at the OU mobile application(Communication and student services)

Supporting Research Evaluation(Research School)

Discovery of open educational resources (Open Media Unit and KMi)

So the technology is mature enough after all?No!

Providing an open SPARQL endpoint is a very bad idea: 1 query can kill everything (and it does… often)

Our approach: leave things open, fix when it breaks

Example: Mirror triple-stores updated in parallel

Example: Simple cache based on serving static files for most popular URIs/query. The cache is updated with the data.

Keep the standard/open/application independent interface: Free and easy reuse helps innovation, an API is an obstacle.

Conclusion

Starting point: Showing off our technology, information integration issues, access to open information

Where we got:(Open) innovation, competitive advantage, Linked Data as part of the backbone of the University’s information infrastructure, new systems built doing linked data by design

BTW, anybody has a better word than backbone for linked data based information infrastructure?

Going further…

We are not the only University (anymore):data.southampton.ac.uk, data.ox.ac.uk, data.aalto.fi, data.uni-muenster.de…

Ultimately, the University does not count: moving to “education à la carte”

The Open University

University of Bristol

University of Southampton

mEducator

University of Muenster, DE

OrganicEduNet

Data.gov.uk education

Orgs., Buidings, Locations

Research outputs

Learning resources

What we need: Community effort

LinkedUniversities.org

What we need: A reusable toolsetMarimba4lib.com

What we need: Compelling, global use cases

LinedUp-Project.eu

Thanks!More info:

http://data.open.ac.ukhttp://lucero-project.org

http://linkeduniversities.org http://linkedup-project.eu

http://mdaquin.net mathieu.daquin@open.ac.uk

What it provides

• Linked Data: URIs resolve with redirects to RDF and HTML, content negotiation

• CC-By license on everything• SPARQL endpoint (SPARQL 1.1)

• That’s all…

Integration

• Big organization = crazy information infrastructure

• Special focus on open/public information:– Course information– Open educational resources

(OpenLearn)– Multimedia material: Podcast

repository, iTunes U, openly licensed Youtube videos

– Open access repository of research publications

Example: Charting our offering

Showing basic charts generated from the answers to SPARQL queries

The only effort required is coming up with the query

Lean-back OU podcast channel on Google TV(IT services)

More on using the users…

Obviously: Won’t be convinced by technological blablaShow examples of what it can do! (BTW we have a problem here…)

More importantly: ask them what they would like to do. We asked: communication services, library people, student services, marketing services, faculties… (they are very creative)

A typical email of my inbox (inspired by a true story):Hi Mathieu, Stuart told me that your linked data thing might help with the problem Laura had with Guy’s system. Can we have a chat?Tx, Ben.

The OU’s presence in the media(Media relations)

Academics in “Arts and Humanities” most often involved with the media (in number of news items)

Topics most commonly mentioned by news outlets own by the BBC (in number of news items)