Project Description

Project abstract

EUCLUD Ontotext

Linked Data has established itself as the de facto means for the publication of structured data over the Web, enjoying amazing growth in terms of the number of organizations committing to use its core principles for exposing and interlinking data sets for seamless exchange, integration, and reuse. More and more ICT ventures offer innovativedata management services on top of Linked (Open) Data, creating a demand for data practitioners possessing skills and detailed knowledge in this area. Ensuring the availability of such expertise will prove crucial if European businesses are to reap the full benefits of these advanced data management technologies, and the know‐how accumulated over the past years by researchers, technology enthusiasts and early adopters in various European Member States. EUCLID will contribute to this goal by providing a comprehensive educational curriculum, supported by multi‐modal learning materials and highly visible eLearning distribution channels, tailored to the real needs of data practitioners.

EUCLID SemsphereBuilding upon the experience of the consortium accumulated in over 20 Linked Data projects with over 40 companies and public offices in more than 10 countries, complemented by feedback from more than 20 training events, and an in‐depth analysis of the community discourse through mailing lists, discussion forums, Twitter, and the blogosphere, the curriculum will focus on techniques and software to integrate, query, and visualize Linked Data, as core areas in which practitioners state to require most assistance. The curriculum will be realized as living learning materials on a community Web site, and will be evaluated, refined, and extended in a webinar series, face‐to‐face training, and through continuous community feedback and contributions coordinated by a designated community manager. A significant share of the materials will consist of examples referring to real‐world data sets and application scenarios, code snippets and demos that developers can run on their machines, as well as best practices and how‐tos.

EUCLID iTunes UIn its final form, the curriculum will be delivered as an eBook series distributed via iTunes U, complemented by the materials collected on the community Web site. By providing these key knowledge‐transfer components, EUCLID will not only promote the industrial uptake of Linked Data best practices and technologies, but, perhaps more importantly, will contribute to their further development and consolidation and support the sustainability of the community ‐ all essential aspects given the novelty of the field and the rapid pace at which it has recently advanced.

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Curriculum design and delivery principles

The Euclid learning materials have been designed and delivered according to the following principles.
 

Curriculum design principles

  1. Industrial Relevance – our curriculum takes into account the needs of industry related to Open Data and Linked Data. Future work aims to automatically mine and analyse relevant job adverts to gain desired competencies for the sector. This principle is supported by principle 2 below.
  2. Team Curriculum Design – where the team is composed of a number of roles to fully capture industrial, academic and pedagogical requirements. Our team comprises industry (Ontotext, FluidOps) who have extensive experience with professional training, industrial requirements and scalable tools, academia (KIT, STI International) who have research expertise in Linked Data and pedagogical experts (The Open University). 
  3. External Collaboration – to gain world-class curriculum expertise where necessary and to facilitate course delivery and dissemination.
  4. Explicit learning goals – to which all content (slides, webinars, eBooks) are developed. Learners are guided through the learning goals by learning pathways – a sequence of learning resources to achieve a learning goal.
  5. Show realistic solutions – rather than toy examples we utilize systems which are deployed and used for real.
  6. Use real data – we use a number of large datasets including for example, the MusicBrainz dataset which contains 100Ms of triples.
  7. Use real tools – our collection of tools are used for real including for example:  Seevl, Sesame, Open Refine and GateCloud. 
  8. Show scalable solutions – based upon industrial-strength repositories and automatic translations – for example using the W3C standard R2RML for generating RDF from large data contained in standard databases.
  9. Eating our own dog food – we monitor communication and engagement with the Linked Data community through W3C email lists, in the social network channels LinkedIn and Twitter as well as content dissemination channels such as Vimeo and SlideShare. We transform the monitoring results into RDF and make these available at a SPARQL endpoint. In this respect we use Linked Data to support Learning Analytics.

 

Curriculum delivery principles

  1. Open to Format – our content is available in a variety of formats including: HTML and as an eBook, as an Apple iBook and on Amazon Kindles. 
  2. Addressibility – every concept in our curriculum is URI-identified so that HTML and RDF(a) machine-readable content is available. 
  3. Integrated – to ease navigation for learners the main textual content, relevant webinar clips, screen casts and interactive components are placed into one coherent space. 
  4. High Quality – we have a formalised process where all materials go through several iterations to ensure quality. For example, for each chapter we run both a practice and a full webinars facilitating critique and commentary.
  5. Self-testing and reflection – in every chapter we include inline quizzes formulated against learning goals enabling students to self-monitor their progress. 
 
 

Project facts

Funded under: Seventh Framework Programme
Area: Intelligent Information Management
Project reference: FP7 - 296229
Total cost: 742,428.00 EUR
EU contribution: 661,998.00 EUR
Execution: From 2012-05-01 to 2014-04-30
Duration: 24 months
Contract type: Coordination and support action
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