During the summer my colleague Phil Barker (author of the Sharing and Learning blog) and I hosted a summer intern, Anna Grant.

Anna’s project was to investigate the feasibility of publishing the data about our courses as Linked Data. Phil subsequently wrote up a blog post about the work which I have been meaning to share for a long time, so here it is; long overdue.

Below I have picked out some quotes from Phil’s original blog post that describe the work that Anna did.

The objectives for Anna’s work were ambitious: survey existing HE [Higher Education] open data and ontologies in use; design an ontology that we can use; develop an interface we can use to create and publish our course data. Anna made great progress on all three fronts.

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The ontologies reviewed were: AIISO, Teach, CourseWare, XCRI, MLO, ECIM and CEDS. A live working draft of the summary / review for these is available for comment as a Google Doc.

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The final draft [of the extended MLO Ontology] is shown below. Key:  Green= MLO, Purple=MLO extension, Blue=ECIM / previous alteration to MLO Yellow= generic ontologies such as Dublin core and SKOS.

MLO Extension to capture taught courses and their relationships to degree programmes.

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Anna has finished her work here now and returns to Edinburgh Napier University to finish her Master’s project. Alasdair and I think she has done a really impressive job, not least considering she had no previous experience with RDF and semantic technologies. We’ve also found her a pleasure to work with and would like to thank her for her efforts on this project.

Source: A short project on linking course data | Sharing and learning