Judging from the discussion afterwards and some reactions on twitter, this was very much welcomed by the audience, especially as an encouragement for members of other universities to get on board the linked data train. I also demoed our latest prototype: DiscOU. It is a “discovery engine” for open educational resources which, in the current demo, can find them from BBC programmes (including iPlayer). We are actually pretty excited about this as it not only applies linked data as well as semantic search techniques to make itself more meaningful and customisable than other recommender tools, but also because it opens the way for a lot of potentially great applications, such as finding open educational resources relevant to museum exhibitions or to courses in other universities.

Now, even more interesting from this presentation and the discussions that followed was the new projects, going beyond Linked Data at the Open University. Linked Universities for example is growing pretty strong, with more datasets, vocabularies and tools being added on a regular basis, and more people getting in touch to discuss the application of linked data in their institution. We also just kicked off a new project, an EU support action called LinkedUp, that is all about web data from across various origins used to create new, innovative educational services. Finally, I’m getting involved in the development of Marimba, a tool developed in Madrid originally for the Spanish National Library to extract linked data from MARC-based library catalogues using customised mappings. We are now working on providing this tool to other universities, including university libraries.

This report is based in large parts on the experience built in the last months of LUCERO, especially in connecting with other organisations and trying to gather common issues and practices, through LinkedUniversities.org.

The report covers the general principles underlying Linked Data technologies and their relevance to the field of education, especially focusing on open and distance learning. It illustrates use case scenarios of Linked Data for learning and teaching through describing existing applications, and details the process of adopting and deploying Linked Data for educational resources and learning-related information. Through publishing it on its website under an open license, COL hopes that this report will become a valuable resource to a wide variety of organisations, raising the general awareness of the benefits of using open Web technologies such as Linked Data for educational purposes.