Scraping Toward A Giant EduGraph

Patrick Murray-JohnACCS 2009Charlottesville, VAMarch 11, 2009

Semantic UMW

A Sad Story . . .

CHEMISTRY 101

CHEMISTRY 101

CHEMISTRY 101ENGLISH 205

YOUR DATA!! SHALL NOT!! PASS!!

CHEMISTRY101ENGLISH205

Here's the part that makes me cry

Flickr image by Addrox CC-BY-NC-ND

BOOKSTORE ORDER:CHEMISTRY 101

BOOKSTORE ORDER:ENGLISH 205

UNIVERSITY

BOOKSTORE

BOOKSTORE ORDER:CHEMISTRY 101

BOOKSTORE ORDER:ENGLISH 205

UNIVERSITY

BOOKSTORE

UNIVERSITY

BOOKSTORE

HELP ME!

Here's the part that makes me cry AGAIN

SYLLABUS:CHEMISTRY 101

SYLLABUS:ENGLISH 205

DEPARTMENT

CHAIR

Why am I crying?

Flickr photo by ifindkarma CC-BY

Flickr photo by manu contreras CC-BY

Instead. . .

Focus on the data, not the document, and links can go anywhere

CHEMISTRY 101Leana daProf

Alice daStudent

Chem101Course Blog

Thankyou!

A Giant EduGraph

Giant Global Graph

Semantic Web (aka Giant Global Graph)

Linked Open Data

Aggregating / ExposingHigher Education Info

CoursesCourse GroupsInstitutions / DivisionsOnline SpacesPlacesEvents / LecturesLibrary / Book DataClubs / OrganizationsRequirements / Credentials

Flickr photo by smannion CC-BY-NC-SA

Image from Wikipedia GNU-FDL

Semantic Web

Identify things with a URI (a node in a graph)

Frankenstein(URI)

Semantic Web

Data is Nodes + Relationships between them

CHEMISTRY101 S09-Group(URI)Frankenstein(URI)Alice daStudent(URI) Studies textMember

Linked Open Data

Semantic Web + some technical goodiesOpen on web

Linked Open Data

Flickr image by Rgis Gaidot CC-BY-NC

What Will It Look Like?

Taps into LOD Cloud

DBpedia references for topics, peopleevents, etc.GeoNames for places, buildings, etc.OpenLibrary for book infoDomain-specific sources (MusicBrainz,Linked Movie Database, more)

What Will It Look Like?

Uses existing vocabulariesSIOC - Semantically Interlinked OnlineCommunities FOAF - Friend Of A FriendDCTERMS - Dublin CoreBIBO - Bibliographic InfoAIISO - Academic Institution InternalStructure Ontology. . . and more, plus some being developed

Where Will The Data Come From?

Scrape existingstructured data

Courses andCourse Groups

Places

People

Requirements & Credentials

Where Will The Data Come From?

Zotero

(actually Bruce D'Arcus' )

likely to expose SW-friendly data in the future

Where Will The Data Come From?

-- 13 years worth of circulation data anonymized and published as XML

-- took about 3 days to RDFize it and make an Exhibit

Follow lead of Univ. of Huddersfield

Where Will The Data Come From?

Talis Project Xiphos

-- Putting UK university reading lists into RDF

Where Will The Data Come From?

Need an easy interface to relate course group data to LOD data (lookup.dbpedia.org)

. . . and to relate people and course groups with online spaces

. . . and to add data that isn't otherwise available

Biggest Challenge

Biggest Challenge

OPENNESS