Weekly Journal

Week 4

June 13, 2014

This week I was able to tackle some design documentation for our MOOC aggregator (still yet to be named). Considering we'd be converting JSON pulled from different MOOC providers like Coursera, we had to tailor an ontology to the properties that we'd have available.

Additionally, in order to create quality linked data it was important that we considered what overlap we might have with existing ontologies. As it turned out, the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative had already extended Schema.org's vocabulary to include information about educational resources. This was a great find, but we still had to extend it to include some course attributes we'd be needing such as syllabus details, recommended background, etc. Here's a look at what our extended ontology looks like currently:

Notice above that our additions are prefixed with sebk.me/MOOC.owl# as opposed to the other classes being pulled from Schema.org because that's where our ontology is hosted at the moment. You can see what this diagram looks like implemented in OWL2 using Protege at that very address: http://sebk.me/MOOC.owl.

In other news, the World Cup started! I've managed to catch every game so far because Dr. Bansal understands the importance of futbol and I've had the fortune of being able to watch the WatchESPN stream while I work. It's been an exciting tournament so far with plenty of twists and turns in the first few matches. Here's to the beautiful game y Viva La Roja!

-Sebastian