Final Product Post: Tabloid

This is the final, formal post of the LUCERO JISC project. However, be reassured, this is far from the last post. More and more activities around linked data are happening at the Open University, and this blog will carry on being a primary channel for communication and discussions around these activities.

For this post, we had to chose one “product” of the project, which we believed was to be most useful and reusable by others. We have done so many things over the last year that choosing one was almost impossible. After a lot of discussion and head scratching, we decided to promote as a product our collection of tools, examples and documentions, explaining the why and how of linked data, as well as the benefit one can get from deploying linked data in a higher education institution. We call this toolkit Tabloid: Toolkit ABout Linked Open Institutional Data.

Users

To clarify very quickly, the intended target audience for the Tabloid Toolkit are not the end-users of linked data. We focus here on helping people in higher education institutions with getting involved in promoting, implementing and deploying linked data within their institution. This includes more or less anybody who would have a role to play in the management of data and information, from PVCs to researchers, librarians and developers.

Overview

Tabloid is an evolving toolkit made of code, documentation and examples in various places, and trying to address the people with various roles involved in the deployment of linked data: from managers who want to quickly understand the benefits, to developers who are expected to work with it, develop applications and integrate it into their technical workflow.

In this sense, Tabloid can be seen an entry point to institutional linked data, with different parts being relevant to different people at different times. It includes many components distributed in different ways, and put together in a coherent structure in the Tabloid Page. In particular, the toolkit contains documentations giving an overview of the basic principles of linked data, of the way it concretely creates benefits and of simple examples of how such benefits can be exploited in research and education scenarios (see What is linked data?). It provides an overview of both the technical and organisational workflows that are necessary to deploy linked data in an institution, and provide some tool support to realise common tasks in such workflows. Finally, Tabloid puts a particular emphasis on the aspect of using and consuming linked data, providing documentation and experience reports regarding the use of linked data. It includes many pointers to a large variety of applications developed within the LUCERO project, together with reusable source code.

Link: The Tabloid page

LUCERO blog up to 1st July 2011:

Many parts of the Tabloid toolkit described above have been drawn out or described in blog posts on the LUCERO Blog. Here we give a brief overview of the content of the blog according to (mostly emerging) categories of posts:

Publishing Datasets

One of the major activities in LUCERO is related to the exposure as linked data of a number of datasets from the Open University. The posts in this category explain and describe how we realised such exposure for a number of datasets.

PRONOM and Linked Data – This post is not actually about a dataset from LUCERO, but comments on one that was exposed by another organisation, based on the experience gained in LUCERO
Publishing OpenLearn Metadata as Linked Data – OpenLearn is the repository of Open Educational Material from the Open University. This post explains how we expose the related metadata as linked data.
Connecting the reading experience database to the Web of Data – This post describes how we exposed the content of the Reading Experience Database and built a demonstrator showing what can be achieved through connecting such data to external source.
Publishing ORO as Linked Data – This post explains how the ORO repository of publications was exposed as linked data on data.open.ac.uk.
First version of data.open.ac.uk – This post announced the release of the very first version of data.open.ac.uk with a small number of datasets.

Documentation and Support

The LUCERO blog is also used to provide easily accessible documentation regarding various aspects of the project. This category contains posts and pages that are intended to help people to better understand the principles and technologies related to linked data.

What is linked data? – This page is intended to give a general overview of the principles and benefits of linked data for readers of the blog unfamiliar with it.
data.open.ac.uk – This page gives an overview of data.open.ac.uk and of its relationship with the project.
Example Queries – This post show example SPARQL queries helping users to understand what can be done with SPARQL and the data.
Initial Overview of the LUCERO workflow – This post described the technical workflow applied in LUCERO to get from existing data sources to up-to-date linked data on data.open.ac.uk.

Tools and Applications

This category includes posts that describe tools and applications developed within the project. It is an important part of the activities in LUCERO, demonstrating through examples how one can benefit from linked data, and how to realise such applications.

What to ask Linked Data? – This describes a tool that extract from a dataset the questions it is particularly good at answering. A demo shows the tool applied on 3 datasets from data.open.ac.uk.
wayOU – Mobile Location Tracking App Using Linked Data – The application described in this post is a mobile app for OU users to track their location at the OU. It has won the “Best Demo Award” at the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011.
ROLE Widget Consumes Linked Data – This guest post from a member of the ROLE project explains how linked data available on data.open.ac.uk was used to create a widget for the learning environment created by ROLE.
Results from the KMi Linked Data Application Competition – This post describes the 4 applications that were submitted to the linked data application development competition organised by LUCERO.
Connecting the reading experience database to the Web of Data – This post describes how we exposed the content of the Reading Experience Database and built a demonstrator showing what can be achieved through connecting such data to external source.

Experience report – Guest posts

One great success of LUCERO is that it has managed to get people outside the project and the linked data community to engage with linked data, create applications of it and generally use the linked data we exposed for a variety of tasks. The posts in this category show a few of such examples.

ROLE Widget Consumes Linked Data – This guest post from a member of the ROLE project explains how linked data available on data.open.ac.uk was used to create a widget for the learning environment created by ROLE.
Know Thyself – This post written by a member of the communication services of the Open University shows how the availability of linked data can be used to quickly answer unexpected queries that aggregate resources from various resources.
Putting Linked Data to Work: A Developer’s Perspective – This guest post written by a developer from the IT department of the Open University demonstrates how linked data can be used and integrated to write new and more cost effective applications, despite the initial confusion that linked data technologies often create.
Introducing LUCERO – This post summarises the effort realised at the beginning of the project to explain and discuss with a large variety of people the expected benefits of linked data.