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A Survey on Linked Data and the Social Web as Facilitators for TEL Recommender Systems

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Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning

Abstract

Personalisation, adaptation and recommendation are central features of TEL environments. In this context, information retrieval techniques are applied as part of TEL recommender systems to filter and recommend learning resources or peer learners according to user preferences and requirements. However, the suitability and scope of possible recommendations is fundamentally dependent on the quality and quantity of available data, for instance, metadata about TEL resources as well as users. On the other hand, throughout the last years, the Linked Data (LD) movement has succeeded to provide a vast body of well-interlinked and publicly accessible Web data. This in particular includes Linked Data of explicit or implicit educational nature. The potential of LD to facilitate TEL recommender systems research and practice is discussed in this paper. In particular, an overview of most relevant LD sources and techniques is provided, together with a discussion of their potential for the TEL domain in general and TEL recommender systems in particular. Results from highly related European projects are presented and discussed together with an analysis of prevailing challenges and preliminary solutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.

  2. 2.

    Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) SCORM: http://www.adlnet.org.

  3. 3.

    Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html.

  4. 4.

    Simple Query Interface: http://www.cen-ltso.net/main.aspx?put=859.

  5. 5.

    http://www.grouplens.org/node/73.

  6. 6.

    http://www.mendeley.com/.

  7. 7.

    LinkedUp: Linking Web Data for Education Project—Open Challenge in Web-scale Data Integration (http://www.linkedup-project.eu).

  8. 8.

    http://ltsc.ieee.org/wg12/par1484-12-1.html.

  9. 9.

    http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/.

  10. 10.

    http://www.iso.org/iso/.

  11. 11.

    http://zope.cetis.ac.uk/profiles/uklomcore/.

  12. 12.

    http://www.dublincore.org/documents/education-namespace/.

  13. 13.

    http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm.

  14. 14.

    http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/.

  15. 15.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15150319.

  16. 16.

    http://globe-info.org/.

  17. 17.

    http://www.koreabrand.net/.

  18. 18.

    http://www.laclo.org/.

  19. 19.

    http://www.ouj.ac.jp/eng/.

  20. 20.

    http://lreforschools.eun.org/.

  21. 21.

    http://www.lornet.org/.

  22. 22.

    http://www.europeana.eu/.

  23. 23.

    http://collection.britishmuseum.org/.

  24. 24.

    http://data.bnf.fr/.

  25. 25.

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ and http://thedatahub.org/dataset/bio2rdf-pubmed.

  26. 26.

    http://data.uni-muenster.de.

  27. 27.

    http://lodum.de.

  28. 28.

    http://openbiblio.net/2011/09/08/ntnu/.

  29. 29.

    http://linkededucation.org.

  30. 30.

    http://linkededucation.org: an open platform to share results focused on educational LD. Long-term goal is to establish links and unified APIs and endpoints to educational datasets.

  31. 31.

    http://www.meducator.net.

  32. 32.

    LinkedUp: Linking Web Data for Education Project—Open Challenge in Web-scale Data Integration (http://www.linkedup-project.eu).

  33. 33.

    http://www.opendiscoveryspace.eu/.

  34. 34.

    http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/d2r-server/.

  35. 35.

    http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/.

  36. 36.

    http://triplify.org/.

  37. 37.

    http://www.linkedlifedata.com.

  38. 38.

    http://www.organic-edunet.eu.

  39. 39.

    http://www.meducator.net.

  40. 40.

    http://dbpedia.org/spotlight.

  41. 41.

    http://www.opencalais.com.

  42. 42.

    http://incubator.apache.org/stanbol/.

  43. 43.

    The reference implementation is part of EntryStore which is Free Software.

  44. 44.

    http://code.google.com/p/entrystore/.

  45. 45.

    http://ckan.net/packages/meducator.

  46. 46.

    http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/index.php/BioPortal_REST_services.

  47. 47.

    http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI.

  48. 48.

    http://creativecommons.org/.

  49. 49.

    https://sites.google.com/site/camschema/.

  50. 50.

    http://www.role-project.eu/.

  51. 51.

    http://www.openscout.net/.

  52. 52.

    http://portal.organic-edunet.eu.

  53. 53.

    http://sioc-project.org/.

  54. 54.

    http://www.foaf-project.org/.

  55. 55.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/hcls-swansioc/.

  56. 56.

    http://xmlns.notu.be/aair/.

  57. 57.

    http://activitystrea.ms/specs/atom/1.0/.

  58. 58.

    http://notube.tv/.

  59. 59.

    http://www.meducator2.net/.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partly funded by the European Union under FP7 Grant Agreement No 317620 (LinkedUp) and the CIP ICT PSP eContentPlus project Open Discovery Space.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. L3S Research Center, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany

    Stefan Dietze

  2. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Welten Institute – Research Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology, Open University of the Netherlands, CELSTEC, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Hendrik Drachsler

  3. DIEEI, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Daniela Giordano

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Correspondence to Stefan Dietze .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Agro-Know, Athens, Greece

    Nikos Manouselis

  2. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Welten Institute – Research Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology, Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands

    Hendrik Drachsler

  3. Department of Computer Science, VUB & KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Katrien Verbert

  4. aDeNu Research Group, Artificial Intelligence Department, Computer Science School, UNED, Madrid, Spain

    Olga C. Santos

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Dietze, S., Drachsler, H., Giordano, D. (2014). A Survey on Linked Data and the Social Web as Facilitators for TEL Recommender Systems. In: Manouselis, N., Drachsler, H., Verbert, K., Santos, O. (eds) Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0530-0_3

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