Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 59, Issue 3, November 2012, Pages 952-962
Computers & Education

A Linked Data approach for the discovery of educational ICT tools in the Web of Data

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2012.04.005Get rights and content

Abstract

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools to support learning activities is nowadays generalized. Several educational registries provide information about ICT tools in order to help educators in their discovery and selection. These registries are typically isolated and require much effort to keep tool information up to date. To address this issue, this paper explores whether educational tool registries can be federated to other datasets currently available on the Web of Data. In order to answer this question, and following the Linked Data approach, this paper proposes to collect data from third-party sources, align it to a vocabulary understandable by educators and finally publish it to be consumed by educational applications. This way, an incipient educational dataset can be automatically created and easily maintained, since non-educative information is obtained from updated third-party sources. A case study with practitioners has been carried out to evaluate whether the information about ICT tools provided by this dataset is understandable and useful for educators. Evaluation results show that available information on the Web of Data can be used to obtain suitable tools for real educational settings, thus overcoming the sustainability problems of existing ICT tool registries.

Highlights

► We collect ICT tool descriptions from different sources in the Web of Data. ► The descriptions collected are related to an educational vocabulary. ► Once related these descriptions are easily found and can be understood by educators. ► A Linked Data approach increases the educational tool data sustainability.

Introduction

The success of the Web 2.0 movement (O'Reilly, 2005) and the proliferation of Web-based applications have stimulated the appearance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools and their adoption to support learning situations (Conole & Alevizou, 2010). Many of these tools were not specifically designed for educational purposes, such as wikis, chats or graphic editors, but they have been successfully employed in the classroom (Richardson, 2010). However, there are so many different ICT tools available that choosing a suitable one for a specific learning situation is not a trivial step, and requires the educator to be informed about the educational capabilities of different ICT tools.

Several surveys (Conole, 2008; Madden, Ford, & Miller, 2005) show that general purpose search engines (such as Google or Bing!) are typically used when looking for educational information. These search engines provide information about ICT tools mixed with a huge amount of documents that are irrelevant for this purpose. In fact, those same surveys show that many teachers are overwhelmed by the amount of information provided by these search facilities (Madden et al., 2005), being even difficult for some users to find useful educational information since data is not properly presented (Conole, 2008). Given these limitations, some authors (De-la-Fuente-Valentín, Pardo, & Delgado-Kloos, 2011; Vega-Gorgojo et al., 2010) have proposed specialized search facilities for the selection of educational ICT tools. By only indexing ICT tools, the answers obtained are often more accurate. Moreover, educational domain information can be exploited to better support educators in the search process. Some examples of this type of systems are Software Library of Universidad Complutense de Madrid1 or CoolToolsForSchools.2

However, the success of these specific search facilities has been limited due to the difficulty and cost of creating and maintaining updated their tool datasets. Part of the problem is that these initiatives are largely isolated, so each party has to provide their own tool descriptions, thus increasing the overall effort and cost. Although data federation (Sheth & Larson, 1990) could alleviate this problem, this is not feasible in practice since proprietary or incompatible data formats and schemas are typically used, which hinder the integration of datasets (Choi, Song, & Han, 2006).

This difficulty in creating a dataset and maintaining its data in domain-specific repositories is an open problem (Bizer, Heath, & Berners-Lee, 2009, chap. 6) which may be tackled following the Linked Data approach (Berners-Lee, 2006). Linked Data has been proposed as a methodology to publish data on the Web to facilitate the automatic access to the information contained in external repositories. Its key idea is to employ a common data format and to reuse third-party schemas or vocabularies in order to allow the Web-scale federation of data repositories (Bizer et al., 2009, chap. 2). Following this idea, many data providers are linking their datasets according to the Linked Data principles, building the so-called Web of Data (Linked Open Data Project, 2009). Some educational institutions, such the Open Data Service of the University of Southampton,3 have recently started to expose their repositories as Linked Data. Nevertheless, there are no final educational applications able to consume data from third-party sources on the Web yet, although some reliable data sources already provide updated information that could be useful for education. For example, DBpedia (Auer et al., 2007) mirrors part of the Wikipedia as Linked Data, including updated ICT tool descriptions that may be employed by educational tool search engines.

Using the information already published in the Web of Data is an interesting possibility to overcome the aforementioned sustainability problems of educational tool registries: on the one hand, it is possible to gather existing ICT tool information from the Web of Data, thus alleviating the effort and associated cost of creating and maintaining their own datasets. On the other hand, ICT tool repositories can expose their datasets as Linked Data, therefore contributing to the expansion of the Web of Data by publishing educational data that may be of use for the search of ICT tools. Pursuing this aim, the present paper explores the sustainability benefits of the Linked Data approach applied to educational ICT tool registries. To illustrate this, the Web of Data is crawled to gather ICT tool descriptions, thus creating an incipient educational ICT tool Linked Data source. Finally, in order to assess the utility of the descriptions extracted from the Web of Data, a case study has been carried out with several practitioners proposing questions based on their practice. By showing the benefits of this approach in the educational domain we expect to motivate the migration of current educational data bases to Linked Data and to pave the way to the development of educational search and annotation tools based on Linked Data.

The rest of the article is structured as follows: Section 2 further analyzes the problem of retrieving educational tool data and discusses the suitability of Linked Data to tackle it. Section 3 proposes a data structure for an educational tool dataset based on Linked Data, which is evaluated in Section 4. Finally, Section 5 sums up the main conclusions of the study as well as future research work.

Section snippets

Search of ICT tools in the learning domain and linked data

This section addresses the state of the art related to the retrieval of educational information about ICT tools. First, the main characteristics of current search systems and data repositories of ICT tools are described, as well as their limitations. Since this paper expects to show that some of these limitations can be tackled following the Linked Data approach, the Linked Data principles are briefly explained and some of their pioneering applications to the educational domain are succinctly

A Linked Data based approach for the description of educational ICT tools

This paper proposes a Linked Data approach to overcome the limitations of educational ICT tool search engines detected in Section 2.1. Its aim is to contribute to the Web of Data with an ICT tool dataset for the educational domain, whose data is obtained from third-party sources and will be available for the discovery of tools and other possible uses. This section first motivates its development and describes the data requirements as well as the suitability of publicly available vocabularies

Evaluation

After setting up an educational ICT tool dataset based on Linked Data principles, this section carries out its evaluation. Previous section showed how to relate ICT tool descriptions currently published in the Web of Data to an educational vocabulary. This data is expected to be used as a start-up dataset for educational applications that could take advantage of the Linked Data approach. Before developing the applications that may use the data, it should be discussed whether educators would

Conclusions and future work

Current educational ICT tool search facilities are limited by the cost of creating and updating their datasets. As these datasets are typically isolated, each data provider should create and update its own tool descriptions; therefore, the overall cost is increased. This paper proposed a Linked Data based approach to allow the federation of educational ICT tool registries with the Web of Data, thus allowing to share descriptions of ICT tools between third-parties and alleviating current data

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