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.

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).

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