I am very pleased to announce that for the first time my name will be appearing as a co-author of an academic paper! Consuming Linked Data within a Large Educational Organization was written by Fouad Zablith, Mathieu d'Aquin, Stuart Brown and myself and is a full research paper which has been accepted for the Second International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD 2011) which will be held in Bonn, Germany on October 23rd. The paper discusses the findings of the Lucero project which investigated the uses of Linked Data in educational institutions. My contribution was mainly the use case seen in an earlier post on this site: An HTML5 Leanback TV webapp that brings SPARQL to your living room but the paper is a much wider in scope than my blog post discussing not only use cases but the role of Linked Data principles to avoid the problems of data "silos" often found in large organisations. The paper can be obtained free-of-charge.
The full abstract of the paper is: Large universities tend to spread their services across several departments to serve their substantial student base. It is very common for this to result in developing different systems, which end up in creating many disconnected data silos within the organization. Data isolation is one of the main bottlenecks that prevent unlocking the full potential behind exploiting such data, to provide a better experience at the level of application deployment and data analysis. The Open University is in the process of connecting their data silos by relying on the Linked Data principles within the LUCERO project. We discuss in this paper three use-cases through which we consume Linked Data produced at the Open University: (1) a student services use-case showing how we exploit data connections to deliver learning material related to courses through the university's main course information website; (2) a mobile course application that enables students to easily explore courses by subject, qualification or research topic; and (3) a Leanback TV service that provides students the ability to watch, with a degree of control, a set of podcasts grouped in different channels. Through these use cases, we highlight in this paper the advantages and effects of consuming Linked Data within an organization.
You can read the full paper by visiting Open Research Online at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/29582/ and clicking on the Download link.