Interlinking educational resources and the web of data - a survey of challenges and approaches

Research in the area of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) throughout the last decade has largely focused on sharing and reusing educational resources and data. This effort has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas, or interface mechanisms. More recently, semantic technologies were taken into account to improve interoperability. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing data on the Web and is fundamentally based on established W3C standards (e.g. RDF, SPARQL). To this end, it is obvious that the application of Linked Data principles offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we survey approaches aimed towards our vision of Linked Education, i.e. education which exploits educational Web data. This particularly considers the exploitation of the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain.