Guidelines to producing structured interoperable data from Open Access Repositories

Abstract

One of the fundamental concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) is "the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge." The application of Semantic Web approach and Linked Data technologies to Open Education seeks to turn data and metadata from open educational repositories into actionable interoperability for the improvement of discovering, using and reusing of OER. Interoperability is not an end in itself. Instead, optimizing the level of interoperability has societal and educational value as a means to others purposes. Interoperability can have a positive impact on open innovation, user choice, ease to reuse and adapt educational materials, global discovery of open and diverse content, among other things. This paper reports on the implementation of Linked Open Data for open access repositories in a new interoperable and global open educational ecosystem. The goal is to improve the metadata interoperability between various collections of open material, so as to facilitate the discoverability and subsequent combining, remixing, or adapting OER; that is, OER data should be easily accessible to any user: human being or a machine agent. This work addressed two challenges in the OER ecosystem: providing evidence of globally discoverability and reusability academic resources. Although there is much further potential for teaching and learning to realize, linked open data is a critical enabler of global and interoperable OER ecosystem. © 2016 IEEE.