Having made great progress with Lucero in October, with the launch of http://data.open.ac.uk, and the publication of our first data sets as Linked Data, we now have something to start talking about and showing to people. We’ve used Twitter extensively for our first wave of dissemination, including the first announcement of data available at http://data.open.ac.uk by Mathieu:

It is easy to see the impact this had on traffic to the website

The announcements we made regarding establishing http://data.open.ac.uk and the first data sets were picked up and retweeted extensively, including re-tweets from Andrew Stott (previously UK Government Director of Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office), and Professor Jim Hendler (a leading expert in the Semantic Web and related technologies)

Twitter has proved effective for immediate dissemination of project milestones, but there is a lot of detailed information that we want to communicate and so we have started to present longer form information, both on this blog, but also through seminars. Mathieu introduced Lucero in a seminar at the Knowledge Media institute (KMi) at the Open University on the 3rd November 2010. A recording of this is now available to view online at the KMi Stadium, and the slides from this presentation are available on Slideshare.  On the same day I gave a presentation to Library staff at the Open University, and the slides are also available on Slideshare.

To reach a wider audience we’ve worked with the Media team at the Open University to issue a press release about the project and data.open.ac.uk. We hope that this will help us reach those who are unlikely to be following the project in detail, but who have an interest in the overall aims and objectives of the project.

We’ll be continuing to disseminate the work of the project through many routes, so keep track through this blog, or by following the team on twitter (@mdaquin, @ostephens, @stuartbrown, @fzablith) and tracking the project hashtag #luceroproject. If you are interested in the type of information you can get from http://data.open.ac.uk you can also look for #queryou where examples of SPARQL queries against the data are being shared (and feel free to add your own).