=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=LinkedUp Veni Competition: Linked and Open Data for Education
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1124/linkedup_veni2013_introduction.pdf
|volume=Vol-1124
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/okcon/dAquinDDGH13
}}
==LinkedUp Veni Competition: Linked and Open Data for Education==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1124/linkedup_veni2013_introduction.pdf
LinkedUp Veni Competition:
Linked and Open Data for Education
∗
Mathieu d’Aquin Stefan Dietze Hendrik Drachsler
The Open University L3S Research Center Open Universiteit Nederland
United Kingdom Germany The Netherlands
m.daquin@open.ac.uk dietze@L3S.de Hendrik.Drachsler@ou.nl
Marieke Guy Eelco Herder
Open Knowledge Foundation L3S Research Center
United Kingdom Germany
marieke.guy@okfn.org herder@L3S.de
ABSTRACT to get adopted by education institutions, with Linked Data
Linked Data is a set of well-defined principles for sharing of technologies being used to expose public information regard-
large datasets on the Web. The huge success and widespread ing course offerings, open educational resources and edu-
adoption of the Linked Data approach has led to the avail- cational facilities in a readily accessible and reusable way.
ability of vast amounts of public data such as DBpedia, While the very nature of the Linked Data approach thus
WordNet RDF or the data.gov.uk initiative. The LinkedUp clearly offers promising solutions that can potentially trans-
Veni Competition, organised by the LinkedUp Project, is form education, it is not yet adopted widely within the ed-
the first in a series of three competitions on tools and de- ucational field.
mos that analyse or integrate open web data for educational
purposes.
2. LINKEDUP PROJECT
The LinkedUp project5 is an FP7 Support Action that seeks
1. INTRODUCTION to explore and exploit open and linked data for education.
The Semantic Web has redefined itself throughout the last This includes data with an explicit educational purpose, as
years as a Web of ‘Linked Data’1 , by establishing principles well as other data and information that may not have an
that support sharing of large datasets on the Web together explicit educational remit, but can usefully be applied to an
with a technology stack - fundamentally based on the use of educational context.
URIs, RDF, and SPARQL - aimed at facilitating these prin-
ciples. The foundation of Linked Data is that data objects LinkedUp conducts activities, including the establishment
on the Web are identified by Web addresses (URIs), which of three competitions and a corresponding evaluation frame-
can be referenced by a Web link, similarly as one would do work. The latter will provide a general framework for evalu-
with Web documents. This basic principle for easy discov- ating all aspects of open Web data-driven applications. All
ery, reference, access and reuse of Web data is now gaining activities aim at identifying and promoting innovative suc-
significant momentum in many different areas. cess stories that exploit large-scale Web data in educational
scenarios as part of robust applications and tools.
The huge success and widespread adoption of the Linked
Data approach has led to the availability of vast amounts Additional dataset curation activities are resulting in a repos-
of public data such as DBpedia2 , WordNet RDF3 or the itory and catalog of well-described and assessed datasets,
data.gov.uk initiative4 . More recently, these approaches started which will support participants of the challenge, as well as
∗Authors listed in alphabetical order. interested data consumers and application developers in gen-
1
http://linkeddata.org/ eral. In addition, suitable use cases are being collected by
2
http://dbpedia.org/ the LinkedUp consortium and associated organizations.
3
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-wordnet-rdf-
20060619/
4
http://www.data.gov.uk 3. VENI COMPETITION
The LinkedUp Veni Competition6 is the first edition of three
consecutive competitions (Veni, Vidi and Vici) looking for
interesting and innovative tools and applications that anal-
yse and/or integrate open web data for educational pur-
poses. The competition was open to anyone who likes mash-
ing up data or creating new and interesting tools and appli-
cations.
5
http://linkedup-project.eu/
6
http://linkedup-challenge.org/veni.html
To support the competition, LinkedUp collected and cat- Seven out of eight of the shortlisted submissions have sub-
aloged data explicitly related to education, as well as re- mitted an extended version of their original submission, pro-
lated data that may be relevant, including useful Web media, viding more details and background information. These pa-
user-generated content, Web lectures or academic publica- pers are included in these proceedings of the LinkedUp Veni
tions. The data is made available through the Linked Edu- Competition.
cation catalog7 as well as through a data endpoint8 , where
a SPARQL endpoint provides access to VoID9 descriptions 5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of currently included datasets. The submissions have been reviewed by an evaluation panel,
led by the LinkedUp Advisory Board:
4. SHORTLIST AND WINNERS
The Veni Competition received 22 submissions from 12 dif-
ferent countries, which offered innovative ideas in areas from • Sören Auer, University of Bonn, Germany
mobile education, knowledge sharing and museum visits, to
• Balaji Venkataraman, Commonwealth of Learning, Canada
politics and sustainable development.
• Dan Brickley, Google, UK
Our evaluation panel considered many aspects of the entries,
including innovation, attractiveness and usefulness. They • Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, EPFL, Switzerland
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 evaluation panel consisted of the following members:
The winners were announced at the Open Knowledge Con-
• Jake Berger, BBC, UK
ference - OKCon 201310 , where the eight shortlisted submis-
sions were presented during a dedicated session. • Boyan Bontchev, Sofia University, Bulgaria
Third Place: We-Share - a social annotation application • Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University
for educational ICT tools. We-Share can help educators to
• Christophe Guéret, Data Archiving and Networked Ser-
find tools to support teaching at all educational levels, and
vices (DANS), Netherlands
received high scores on educational innovation.
• Denis Gillet, EPFL, Switzerland
Second Place: Globe-Town - a ‘fun to use’ tool that lets
users find out the most important trade partners, migrant • Davinia Hernández-Leo, UPF, Spain
populations and airline routes of their own countries. It
• Geert-Jan Houben, TU Delft, Netherlands
also provides infographics on issues regarding society, envi-
ronment and economy. • Marco Kalz, CELSTEC, Open University, Netherlands
First Place: Polimedia - connects transcripts of the Dutch • Peter Kraker, Know-Center, Austria
parliament with media coverage in newspapers and radio
bulletins. Polimedia employs innovative information tech- • Leonardo Lezcano, CELSTEC, Open University, Nether-
niques and provides an attractive front-end that invites ex- lands
ploration and browsing. • Stefanie Lindstaedt, TU Graz, Austria
The remaining shortlisted entries are: • Abelardo Pardo, University of Sydney, Australia
• Olga C. Santos, UNED, Spain
• DataConf - a mobile mashup that enriches conference
publications. • Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcalà, Spain
• Knownodes - enables defining and exploring connec- • Fridolin Wild, KMI, Open University, UK
tions between web resources and ideas • Krassen Stefanov, Sofia University, Bulgaria
• Mismuseos - browse and explore the backgrounds and • Slavi Stoyanov, CELSTEC, Open University, Nether-
relations between objects from multiple Spanish mu- lands
seums.
• ReCredible - a browsable topic map with wikipedia- The LinkedUp Project is funded by the European Union
like content next to it. under FP7 Grant Agreement No 317620.
• YourHistory - a Facebook app that shows historic
events that are related to your own life.
7
http://datahub.io/group/linked-education
8
http://data.linkededucation.org/linkedup/catalog/
9
http://www.w3.org/TR/void/
10
http://okcon.org/