The LUCERO Project

LUCERO is a 1 year project funded by the JISC Information Environment 2011 Programme under the call Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research.

Working with groups of learners, researchers and practitioners based at the Open University, LUCERO will scope, prototype, pilot and evaluate reusable, cost-effective solutions relying on the linked dataprinciples and technologies for exposing and connecting educational and research content. Core sets of resources considered within LUCERO are institutional repositories of research and educational material, including collaborations with the Faculty of Arts to scope, pilot, prototype and evaluate specific content exposure and linked data requirements of researchers working within the Arts and Arts History domains, providing experience on the exposure and connection of research data outputs, and demonstrating their concrete benefits. On the basis of such concrete experience, the project will aim to document business process changes required to achieve successful integrated institutional approaches to exposing educational and research content as linked data.

As a project tag we use luceroproject (mostly on this blog and on twitter, as #luceroproject)

Please contact Mathieu d’Aquin for any enquiries.

Team

	Dr. Mathieu d’Aquin (project director) is a researcher at KMi. He obtained a PhD from the University of Nancy, France, where he worked on real-life applications of semantic technologies to knowledge management and decision support in the medical domain. As a member of the EU Integrated Project NeOn, Mathieu has researched large-scale infrastructures for the discovery, indexing and exploitation of semantic data (e.g. the Watson Semantic Web search engine, Cupboard system for managing semantic information spaces), as well as in numerous research prototypes in concrete applications of these developments.
	Fouad Zablith is a researcher and PhD candidate at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University. Within the LUCERO project, he’s working on modelling and deploying data in various university contexts, published within http://data.open.ac.uk. His research PhD is in the Semantic Web area, focussing on ontology evolution from external domain data, by reusing various sources of background knowledge. Fouad is also the web consultant of the Open Arts Archive project (http://www.openartsarchive.org), responsible of the implementation and maintenance of the website.
	Prof. Enrico Motta is Professor of Knowledge Technologies at KMi and a leading international scientist in the area of Semantic Technologies, with extensive experience of both fundamental and applied research. Over the years, he has authored more than 200 refereed publications and collaborated with a variety of organizations, including Nokia, Rolls-Royce, Fiat, Phillips, and the United Nations, to name just a few, while receiving close to £7M in external research funding. 41.
	Owen Stephens is the Project Manager for LUCERO. He joined the Open University in 2009 and was previously Project Manager for the JISC-funded TELSTAR (Technology enhanced learning supporting students to achieve academic rigour) project delivered at the Open University. Owen also works as an independent consultant to the library sector. As well as a strong technical background, he has been on the management team of the library services of two leading UK Universities he has been responsible for a number of innovative projects at both institutional and national levels. Owen was Project Director for the EThOSNet project to launch national e-theses service based at the British Library, and is the founder of the ‘Mashed Libraries’ events in the UK.
	Stuart Brown (@stuartbrown) is Web Developments and Online Communities manager at The Open University. Involved in implementing the OU’s move to Drupal as default CMS Stuart is interested in both reuse of OU linked data within the OU’s web publishing environment as well as ensuring OU web publishing activity plays a role in the OU’s continued publication of linked data. Working with colleagues and systems across the OU Stuart hopes to help ensure that a linked data approach becomes a part of core OU activity.
	Salman Elahi is a research assistant at KMi. He obtained his Master’s degree in Knowledge Management and Engineering from the University of Edinburgh. Prior to joining KMi, he has been working as a Software Engineer on projects related to the use of semantic technologies to enhance search systems in the domain of Freshwater Sciences. At KMi, he is involved in the Watson and Cupboard projects. He has also started his part-time PhD looking at issues related to identity and personal information management.
	Richard Nurse is Digital Libraries Programme Manager at the Open University Library.  Richard joined the Open University in 2009 and leads on Digital Library and website initiatives. He has considerable experience of library systems management and extensive experience of managing funded projects from the National Lottery and Wolfson Challenge Fund. Richard has been a key member of the recent collaborative JISC-funded TELSTAR (Technology enhanced learning supporting students to achieve academic rigour) project delivered at the Open University.