OpenScout: harvesting business and management learning objects from the web of data

Ricardo Kawase presenting @LILE2013 @WWW2013

Already existing open educational resources in the field of Business and Management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, it is difficult to act on OERs as some data is hidden. In the meanwhile, numerous repositories provide Linked Open Data on this field. Though, users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In this paper, we present the strategies to gather heterogeneous learning objects from the Web of Data, and we provide an overview of the benefits of the OpenScout platform. Despite the fact that not all data repositories strictly follow Linked Data principles, OpenScout addressed individual variations in order to harvest, align, and provide a single end-point. In the end, OpenScout provides a full-fledged environment that leverages on the Linked Open Data available on the Web and additionally exposes it in an homogeneous format.

Authors:  Ricardo Kawase, Marco Fisichella, Katja Niemann, Vassilis Pitsilis, Aristides Vidalis, Philipp Holtkamp and Bernardo Pereira Nunes

PDF: kawase-www13-lile13

Skill-Based Scouting of Open Management Content

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content.

Venue: ECTEL2010

Authors: Katja Niemann, Uta Schwertel, Marco Kalz, Alexander Mikroyannidis, Marco Fisichella, Martin Friedrich, Michele Dicerto, Kyung-Hun Ha, Philipp Holtkamp and Ricardo Kawase

PDF: niemann-ectel2010