=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1383/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=Integrating Semantic Web Technologies in the Architecture of BBC Knowledge & Learning Beta Online Pages
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-1383
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/LiuML14
}}
==Integrating Semantic Web Technologies in the Architecture of BBC Knowledge & Learning Beta Online Pages==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper9.pdf
Integrating Semantic Web Technologies in the
Architecture of BBC Knowledge & Learning
Beta Online Pages
Dong Liu, Eleni Mikroyannidi, Robert Lee
British Broadcasting Corporation, Future Media Knowledge & Learning, Salford, UK
{dong.liu, eleni.mikroyannidi, robert.lee}@bbc.co.uk
1 Abstract
The BBC has understood the value of online learning from the early stages of
the web, and has provided rich educational material to those wanting to learn.
An example of this is the BBC Bitesize website1 , which started back in 1998 and
is a popular formal education resource.
In the formal learning space the BBC has a number of sites: the already
mentioned Bitesize, Skillswise2 and Class Clips3 amongst others. There are tens
of thousands of content items across these sites, with each site having different
mechanisms for publishing, discovering and describing the content it serves.
To provide a coherent learning experience to users, a model for describing
content in the context of the UK national curricula was developed. This model
provided the foundation for building the new Knowledge & Learning beta web-
site, presenting learning resources in the context of the UK national curricula in
a consistent way. In addition, it allows for consistent reflection of changes in the
national curricula throughout the product.
Designing the architecture of such a system is a challenging task. Each of
the existing sites have similar yet different ways of describing and navigating
through their content. In addition, the existing learning sites do not have a
single content description model that could be reused in the beta site. Having
a flexible structure in the back-end that can reflect the national curriculum and
that can be used for consistently describing and organising learning resources is
a key feature of the architecture.
We are going to present the architecture behind the Knowledge & Learning
Beta site and we focus on the curriculum ontology, which is central to the archi-
tecture. We show how it is used to describe and organise learning resources, how
it supports navigation and how it is aligned with semantic markup vocabularies
for better precision in search. We will also present some of the challenges we
faced and discuss future work.
1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/
2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise
3
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/
The overview of the architecture of the architecture is shown in Figure 1. The
curriculum ontology plays a key role in the description of the learning resources,
which are video clips and revision guides.
Fig. 1: The BBC Knowledge & Learning Architecture.
Following a Dynamic Semantic Publishing (DSP) model, the BBC Knowledge
& Learning system incorporates semantic web models and linked data in its
architecture. In the Knowledge & Learning Online Pages, different components
of the front end are served by different systems in the back-end.
In a nutshell, the ontology and its instance data are served by the Linked Data
Platform, which amongst other services it provides the BBC internal triple store.
Learning content such as video clips and revision guides are saved in a different
system named as Content Store. The coupling between Learning resources and
curriculum ontology is done through semantic annotation. In particular, the
content items are semantically annotated with curriculum instances so that the
Application Layer can retrieve related content for curriculum ontology instances.
The Curriculum Ontology aims (1) to provide a model of the national curric-
ula across the UK, (2) to organise learning resources, e.g. video clips and revision
guides and (3) to allow users to discover content via the national curricula. These
are achieved by providing broad units of learning (e.g. a Topic) and more finely
grained units (e.g. a Topic of Study).
The Curriculum Ontology is the glue that holds the content together and
the basis of the website navigation. One of the benefits of this is that it can of-
fer dynamic aggregations of content achieved by querying the linked curriculum
data. It can also help to easily discover content. For example, the recommen-
dations on other relevant topics to a video clip is done via the ontology data.
Building additional recommendation services using the curriculum ontology and
other BBC and external ontologies is a promising direction.
Finally we will show how, mapping the Curriculum Ontology concepts with
learning markup vocabularies, such as the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative
(LRMI), allowed for better precision in search using the metadata of the learning
content.