Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global Graph

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Universities and Colleges in the Giant Global
Graph
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Structure of the Session

• Introductory presentations concepts and
  examples
• Introductions.
• Who are we all, what is our knowledge and
  background in this area, why are we here?
• Focus 1 management of TL
• Focus 2 delivery/activities of TL

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Why Are We Here?

• 1. Because the meme of Linked Data has clarified
  where there is traction with the Semantic Web.
• More clear now
• What is likely in practice through a bottom-up
  and minimalist approach riding on a tide of
  adoption
• vs
• What is possible in principle with a consistent
  stack of semantic web technologies
• 2. A background movement to open up public data

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Bio2RDF atlas of post-genomic knowledge
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Linking Open Data cloud diagram by Chris Bizer
But some of these are scraped or use Natural
Language Processing
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Principles of Linked Data

• Tim Berners-Lee Four Rules
• Assign URIs to things
• Use http URIS so people can look them up
• Return information using standards (e.g. RDF,
  well-known ontologies)
• Link to other things
• Non-Rules to consider
• Dont worry too much about the semantic word
• Think things and representations of them
  (information) not documents
• Distinguish information resources from
  non-information resources. E.g. the Eiffel Tower
  and an information resource about it were created
  at different times and by different people.

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A Quote Tim Berners-Lee

• We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap,
  which had lots of languages that we wanted to
  create. The community got a bit distracted from
  the idea that actually the most important piece
  is the interoperability of the data. The fact
  that things are identified by URIs is the key
  thing.
• The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because
  when weve got the web of linked data, there are
  already lots of technologies that exist to do
  fancy things with it. But its time now to
  concentrate on getting the web of linked data out
  there.
• From ReadWriteWeb (via Talis Nodalities)

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Future Directions

• Unimaginable things?
• Visualisation
• And user interfaces generic and specialised
• Web of things
• Devices
• Sensors

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Introductions and Interests
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Questions to lead our discussion

• What information is available but locked up in
  documents or web pages (e.g. National Student
  Survey raw data) ?
• What information is locked up in university,
  college and other sector agency databases that
  could be exposed (e.g. anonymised library
  borrowing data) ?
• What new opportunities or knowledge arise from
  making this data available and joining it up?
• anything more?

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Focus Ideas 1 Management of TL

• Quality Enhancement and Assurance
• Accountability
• Business Intelligence
• Management Information
• Benchmarking
• Transparency
• Graduate employment

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Focus Ideas 2 Teaching and Learning

• Resource discovery
• Knowledge structures, cow-paths, further
  disintermediation of the teacher
• Sense-making of distributed discourse
• Learner as researcher new information literacy,
  asking questions, testing hypothesis,
  visualisation. Social sciences? Physical
  sciences?
• Assessment
• Personal tutoring, pastoral care
• Some of these may venture more deeply into
  proper semantic technologies, to AI. How deep
  is too deep at what point would we stray from
  the believable to dreamland? Or should we not
  worry and just consider the potential value of
  data for people to do unanticipated things with.

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Process

• Discuss the focus generate shared understanding
  of the scope
• Break-out to groups
• Who are the stakeholders (broad categorisation)
• What information is available but only as
  documents or web pages
• What information is locked up in university,
  college and other sector agency databases
• What new opportunities or knowledge arise from
  making this data available and joining it up
• Report back
• One or more scenarios to motivate progress
• A to-be fragment of the Linked Data Cloud
• Who are holders of key data sources that
  CETIS/JISC should work with to make these sources
  open and linkable, and
• Blockers and enablers