A Case Study on Linked Data for University Courses

Abstract

Abstract. Óbuda University wanted to build a linked dataset describing their courses in the semester. The concepts to be covered included curricula, subjects, courses, semesters and educators. A particular use case needed the description of lecture rooms and events as well. Although there are several ontologies for the mentioned domains, selecting a set of ontologies fitting our use case was not an easy task. After realizing the problems, we created the Ontology for Linked Open University Data (OLOUD) to fill in the gaps between re-used ontologies. OLOUD acts as a glue for a selection of existing ontologies, and thus enables us to formulate SPARQL queries for a wide range of practical questions of university students. OLOUD integrates data from several sources and provides personal timetables, navigation and other types of help for students and lecturers.Keywords: Ontology · Linked Open Data · Linked Open University Data · SPARQL IntroductionIn this paper we focus on a special segment of open data at the university domain: university courses. We aim to facilitate the implementation of Smart Universities [1] by defining a common data model for course information. Ontological representation as the most modern description method for the problem domain was chosen. Originally our objective was to develop a generic data model for university course related data. During our work we noticed that though the Bologna Process ensures a certain level of compatibility for education systems in the EU, this does not reach deeper constructs regarding the educational model. We found that the meaning of the main concepts (like course, subject and study programme) is quite different in currently available educational models in Europe. Presenting course related information requires a lot of data originating from multiple information systems at a typical university. As these systems are usually not fully integrated and the access to the data is limited, significant effort is necessary to suc-

Added Values of Linked Data in Education: A Survey and Roadmap

“…Similarly, the University of La Laguna (ULL) did, but they indicated the following of an iterative and incremental methodology to make frequent refinements on results [11]. Lastly, Óbuda University published a research in [12], which illustrated their needs to build a 'glue' ontology from existing educational ontologies to build the model that satisfies their requirements. Since all of the above-mentioned universities followed the principle of reusing existing educational ontologies as much as possible, all of them confirmed their needs to extend these vocabularies and even making bridges between them to fulfill their requirements.…”

“…However, the following datasets generated by many universities: geographical and campus buildings information, research and scientific publications, libraries catalogue, staff members' information, events and podcasts datasets. Details about such datasets could be found in [6,10,12,16].…”

“…By reviewing the various works within integration in formal education field that presented in [1,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] and CURONTO ontology [17], we extracted the most used vocabularies. AIISO (http: //vocab.org/aiiso/schema) [18], Courseware (http://courseware.rkbexplorer.com/ontologies/ courseware), TEACH (http://linkedscience.org/teach/ns/teach.rdf) [19], MLO (http://svn.cetis.…”

“…For cleaning and interlinking instances OpenLink Virtuoso 11 "is a database engine that combines the functionality of RDBMS, virtual databases, RDF triple stores, XML store, web application server and file servers" [55] Storing Pubby 12 Provides LD interface for SPARQL triple stores.…”

Linked data generation for courses and events at Óbuda University

“…In this work, an existing ontology, Ontology for Linked Open University Data (OLOUD) 1 was used. According to [5], OLOUD is a practical approach to model higher education related concepts.…”