assembling and applying an education graph based on learning resources in universities

Assembling and Applying an Education Graph based on Learning

Resources in Universities

Tom Heath, Ross Singer, Nadeem Shabir, Chris Clarke and Justin Leavesley

Talis Education Ltd

LiLe2012, Lyon, 17th April 2012

What do we mean by an 'Education Graph'?

● The Web is a graph of documents

● Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. capture elements of a 'social graph'

● The Web of Data is one big, heterogeneous graph encoded in RDF

● The 'education graph' is a portion of that graph concerned with learning and teaching

Overview

● Talis Aspire and the institutional sub-graph

● Applications of a broader education graph

● Ongoing and Future Work

Talis Aspire Campus Edition

Talis Aspire Campus Edition

● ~30 customers in the UK and beyond● 10,000s of reading lists● 100,000s of learning resources● Loads of users every day!

● Backed by a hosted triplestore● Linked Data views available on the public Web● A real, live Linked Data application that people pay for● (Probably) the most heavily used Linked Data application

in the education domain

The slightly more technical bits...

From Plain Text to a 'Biblio-graph-ic' Record

● Problem● Only some data is entered in structured form● Legacy data is typically plain text citations

● Our Approach● Pre-process citation text with regex● Pass through heavily modified version of FreeCite● Clean output again with regex● Return as JSON object● Pass through entity reconciliation process...

Enhancing Data Quality with Entity Reconciliation

● Validate the accuracy of the record by matching against high-quality reference data sources

● Data sources● OpenLibrary, OpenKB (serials/journals), CrossRef

● Process● Books: match on a precise edition● Articles: enrich the graph describing the resource using

OpenKB, search CrossRef using enriched description● Map record to canonical resource

A Happy By-Product

Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/

Unifying the Institutional Sub-Graphs

● Goal● Create a cross-institution (portion of) the education

graph, centred around learning resources

● Process● Harvest the data from each Campus Edition triplestore● Repeat the entity reconciliation process

– Retain the mapping of canonical resources to those on institutional lists

Applications: Talis Aspire Community Edition

Applications: Recommending Learning Resources

Ongoing and Future Work

● Evaluation of recommendation quality● Role/importance of list length, list position, list sections,

section ordering

● Linked Data-based data warehousing infrastructure (for analytics and prototyping)

● Alternative approaches to triple-storage

● Integration of other portions of the education graph

Questions?

Web: talisaspire.com

Twitter: @talisaspire

YouTube: youtube.com/user/TalisAspire

Facebook: facebook.com/talisaspire