The UK's Open University (OU) is reportedly the first university in the nation to open up access to online data from across the institution as part of the Linked Open Data Movement.
The JISC-funded OU's LUCERO (Linking University Content for Education and Research Online) project has enabled information stored across many of the university's websites to be brought together in a common, openly accessible location http://data.open.ac.uk.
Data about the OU's courses, podcasts on iTunes U and academic publications are already available to be queried and explored. The team is now working to bring together educational and research content from the university's OpenLearn and library material. At present, this mostly represents a technical platform. However, it will make it possible for the OU and others to create new applications to search and make use of the data.
The idea of 'linked data' - as advocated in particular by web inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee - is that the web should be seen as a medium for structured, interlinked and machine-processable information, as much as, in its current form, a network of documents presenting the information. Via LUCERO, OU is looking to make the initial step on behalf of UK universities to contribute to what was the original intention behind a World Wide Web.
Linked data is a set of technological principles to expose on the web not only web pages containing information, but also the underlying data in a way which is directly linkable and reusable. In embracing such principles, OU seeks to join organisations such as the UK, US and Australian governments, and international media outlets, such as the BBC and the New York Times.
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