About our research

Linked Data is an emerging trend on the web with top companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft promoting their own means of marking up data semantically. Despite the increasing prevalence of Linked Data, there are a limited number of applications that implement and take advantage of its capabilities, particularly in the domain of education.

In order to incorporate MOOC data into the Linked Data cloud as well as demonstrate the potential of Linked Data when applied to education, we propose to (i) build or extend an RDF ontology that denotes MOOC properties and relationships (ii) use our ontology to generate Linked Data from multiple MOOC providers and (iii) implement this data in a practical web application that allows users to discover courses across different MOOC providers.

MOOCLink is the name of our web application which aggregates online courses as Linked Data and utilizes that data to discover and compare open courseware. A semantic web stack of Apache Tomcat as the web server and servlet container, Fuseki as the SPARQL server, TDB as the RDF store, and JavaServer Pages and Java Servlets to dynamically create webpages is proposed to achieve this.

Read our full report here.