Linked Data is a set of well-de ned principles for sharing of large datasets on the Web. The huge success and widespread adoption of the Linked Data approach has led to the availability of vast amounts of public data such as DBpedia, WordNet RDF or the data.gov.uk initiative. The LinkedUp Veni Competition, organised by the LinkedUp Project, is the rst in a series of three competitions on tools and demos that analyse or integrate open web data for educational purposes.
The LinkedUp Veni Competition6 is the rst edition of three consecutive competitions (Veni, Vidi and Vici) looking for interesting and innovative tools and applications that analyse and/or integrate open web data for educational purposes. The competition was open to anyone who likes mashing up data or creating new and interesting tools and applications. 5http://linkedup-project.eu/ 6http://linkedup-challenge.org/veni.html To support the competition, LinkedUp collected and cataloged data explicitly related to education, as well as related data that may be relevant, including useful Web media, user-generated content, Web lectures or academic publications. The data is made available through the Linked Education catalog7 as well as through a data endpoint8, where a SPARQL endpoint provides access to VoID9 descriptions of currently included datasets.
The Veni Competition received 22 submissions from 12 different countries, which o ered innovative ideas in areas from mobile education, knowledge sharing and museum visits, to politics and sustainable development.
Our evaluation panel considered many aspects of the entries, including innovation, attractiveness and usefulness. They also looked at the relevance for education, the usability and performance of the tools, the data the entry uses or provides, and the way privacy and other legal aspects are dealt with. The winners were announced at the Open Knowledge Conference - OKCon 201310, where the eight shortlisted submissions were presented during a dedicated session. Third Place: We-Share - a social annotation application for educational ICT tools. We-Share can help educators to nd tools to support teaching at all educational levels, and received high scores on educational innovation.
Second Place: Globe-Town - a `fun to use' tool that lets users nd out the most important trade partners, migrant populations and airline routes of their own countries. It also provides infographics on issues regarding society, environment and economy.
First Place: Polimedia - connects transcripts of the Dutch parliament with media coverage in newspapers and radio bulletins. Polimedia employs innovative information techniques and provides an attractive front-end that invites exploration and browsing.
DataConf - a mobile mashup that enriches conference publications.
Knownodes - enables de ning and exploring connections between web resources and ideas Mismuseos - browse and explore the backgrounds and relations between objects from multiple Spanish museums.
ReCredible - a browsable topic map with wikipedialike content next to it.
YourHistory - a Facebook app that shows historic events that are related to your own life. Seven out of eight of the shortlisted submissions have submitted an extended version of their original submission, providing more details and background information. These papers are included in these proceedings of the LinkedUp Veni Competition.
The submissions have been reviewed by an evaluation panel, led by the LinkedUp Advisory Board:
Balaji Venkataraman, Commonwealth of Learning, Canada
The evaluation panel consisted of the following members:
Christophe Gueret, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Netherlands
Marco Kalz, CELSTEC, Open University, Netherlands
Abelardo Pardo, University of Sydney, Australia
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain
Slavi Stoyanov, CELSTEC, Open University, Netherlands The LinkedUp Project is funded by the European Union under FP7 Grant Agreement No 317620.